“How Not to Treat the Family Idols” based on Genesis…

October 16, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

The
characters in this story don’t emerge from a vacuum. Their story has
been going on for quite a while by the time we get to this part of
Genesis. Jacob, you may remember, was the second born of a set of
twins who infuriated his brother by stealing both his brother’s
birthright and their father’s final blessing. In order to avoid
being murdered by his twin brother, and at their mother’s advice, he
went to live with her family.

The
first person he encountered when he arrived was a beautiful woman at
a well (which is Biblical foreshadowing for …. marriage) who
happened to be his cousin Rachel. Her father Laban was his mother’s
brother. This is not presented as an issue. Jacob wants to marry
Rachel, and Laban says he has to work for him for 7 years in order to
pay off her bride-price. So, besotted, Jacob does. After seven
years there is a wedding and a wedding night, and when he wakes up in
the morning Jacob discovers that it is Rachel’s sister Leah in his
bed. He objects – rather strongly. Laban comes up with some weak
explanation about not being able to marry off the younger sister
first and then suggests that Jacob can marry Rachel too, if he’ll
simply spend one week with Leah first and agree to work for him for
another 7 years.

It
turns out, in case you couldn’t figure this out yourself, that
sisters make super terrible sister wives. I bet you were able to
figure that out on your own though. Leah and Rachel spent years
trying to fight with each other for Jacob’s attention, and that
included a fairly elongated “baby war” in which each tried to
outdo the other in producing offspring for Jacob. If you wanted to
know, Leah won, although Rachel remained Jacob’s favorite. After the
next 7 years of labor had been completed, Jacob made a deal with
Laban to stay on for a while longer in order to leave with some herds
of his own. At that point both Laban and Jacob did everything they
could to trick each other into getting the worst possible deal.
Jacob was a trickster, Laban was a trickster, and neither of them
treated each other well. On the whole, Laban treated Jacob more
roughly than Jacob treated him.

Finally,
about 21 years after arriving on his uncle’s doorstep – and
apparently while his uncle was as far from home as possible, Jacob
packed up his wives, his children, his herds, and his possessions and
headed back home (uncertain about if his brother still wanted to kill
him).

So
now we’re caught up – as long as we remember that when they packed
everything up to leave, Rachel took the family idols with them and
Jacob didn’t know about it. What were the family idols? Well,
they’re also called the family gods. They were physical
representations of gods used in some sort of ritual worship, usually
at an at-home altar. In addition to being items to which one
directed one’s prayers, they were also thought to protect the family
and its good fortune. That is, if they were lost or stolen, it was
assumed that the LUCK of the family went with them. While the Bible
suggests that Jacob and Laban prospered because God was with Jacob,
Rachel may not have shared that assumption.

In
the story that precedes this one in Genesis, Leah and Rachel discuss
how their father cheated them by not giving them their portion of
their bride prices, and it is also possible that Rachel just took the
idols to counteract that, or to bother her father, or because she was
scared and wanted their protection, or maybe she was just greedy. I
do think, on the basis of the stories of Genesis and what they say
and what they don’t say, that Laban was probably an abusive parent
and employer. Furthermore, by the story Genesis tells, Jacob himself
isn’t really converted to YHWH worship yet. That will happen on this
journey back into the land, on the night when he is said to have
“wrestled with an angel” and gets renamed Israel. It thus seems
unlikely that Jacob’s wives would be monotheistic at this point, and
whatever other reasons Rachel had for taking the household idols,
likely she thought they’d be a source of protection for their family.

Laban
was furious when he found out and he brought a war party with him to
go after the family. It isn’t clear if he would have gone if it were
not for the family idols, but it sort of sounds like he is most upset
about the idols and not the loss of his children and grandchildren.

The
story gives us just enough geography to know that the place Jacob,
Leah, and Rachel were staying was INSIDE the boundaries of what would
one day be ancient Israel. It was just far enough inside that the
place Laban slept the night before he caught up with them was inside
too. This is significant because it tells us this is both an OLD OLD
story and one that got edited as they years went by. In the early
development of understanding YHWH, there was a time when it was
assumed that YHWH’s powers only existed within the boundaries of the
Promised Land. Genesis tells us that Jacob had a dream involving a
message from God on his way out of the land, and Laban has one right
after he crosses into it. It is as if God is limited by those
boundaries. The understanding of where the boundaries would BE
however was defined by political boundaries that existed centuries
later, and the clues the text gives us imply those boundaries. Isn’t
the Bible fun?

OK.
So Laban has a dream in which he is warned not to speak harshly to
Jacob which is most significant because it reminds us that people
used to think that God had boundaries. Although, let’s be honest.
People still think that. It is remarkable how people think about
churches and other places of worship as more “holy” or more
“filled with God” than other places. When he does catch up with
the next generation of his family, Jacob is HORRIFIED as his
accusations and responds with surety that no one has done what he is
accusing them of. That is, Jacob thinks Laban is falsely accusing
them – with good reason based on their history – and grandiosely
offers a death penalty for the one who has the idols because he is SO
SURE they don’t have them.

This
is a problem for Rachel. Nothing of her motivation is explained in
the text but it seems clear that she decided she didn’t want to die.
She thinks fast and she comes up with a plan, she enacts it, and it
works. She lives, her father goes home, and all is well, except
maybe for the idols. The plan itself, however, is proof of how
little power she otherwise had. She used what she had – her
femininity and how it was treated in her culture – to save her own
hide.

The
plan was super simple: she put the idols underneath her and she told
her father she was menstruating. Was she? That’s completely unclear
and likely irrelevant. However, she SAID she was. By the customs of
the time, no man shouldn’t have been in her tent while she was
menstruating, and he violated that cultural expectation by examining
the rest of her tent. He wasn’t going to push any further though,
and he left. By putting the idols underneath her AND coming up with
a valid reason not to get up, Rachel saved her own life and got to
keep the idols she’d wanted to begin with. She used what she had –
fear of menstruating women and an assurance that no one would check
her on that – to subvert the power of her father.

However,
she also desecrated the idols. It sort of doesn’t matter if she
actually was menstruating on them or not, the implication is enough.
It may be that this story has multiple intentions and denigrating the
power of idols is one of them. By the time this story was written
down the people knew the Ten Commandments, including the one about
not making idols. It was clear that YHWH was not to be represented
in physical form, and Walter Brueggemann says that this is so that
people can’t pick up the idol, move it around, put it where they want
it, and have the sense that they control YHWH. YHWH is not a God who
is controlled by humans. This story, which discusses menstruating on
idols seems like a very effective reminder to those who weren’t YHWH
worshippers about the relative weakness of their gods.

The
story also functions as a story about the formation of the national
boundaries. It claims that the Eastern boundary of Israel was first
created by a covenant between Laban and Jacob, and that as such it is
almost inherent.

It
is also a good story – it keeps our attention pretty well. Sadly
though, this is the last interaction that Leah and Rachel have with
their father. Rachel is left sitting alone in her tent while the
covenant is formed and her father leaves again. While Jacob and his
family are safe, and while Laban was likely an awful father, there is
some lingering sadness at the end.

The
biggest clue in this story that something is WRONG isn’t that Jacob
decides to leave while Laban is far away, and no one in the household
tells Laban for THREE DAYS. That would indicate they thought they
were protecting the vulnerable from the one who was doing them harm.
Jacob got Rachel and Leah, as well as his family, out of an unsafe
home for them.

Rachel
tried to take something with her for protection along the way, and it
became the excuse by which her father almost killed them all. In
that moment Laban sounds like an abusive partner who will kill their
partner rather than let them leave, and Laban’s dream is the only
thing that held him back. Rachel survived, and likely they ALL
survived, because of her quick thinking and willingness to use what
she had.

Many
women throughout history have been used and abused by powerful men.
Furthermore, many PEOPLE throughout history have been used and abused
by those with more power than they had. Some, like Rachel, use
everything they have, everything in their power, every subversive
action in the world to get out. Sometimes they succeed. May God
continue to guide those who seek safety, and may those who need
safety keep Rachel’s wits about them! Amen

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hershttp://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

October 16. 2016

Sermons

“Allowing the Boys to Live” based on Exodus 1:8-22

October 9, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Throughout the Hebrew Bible, the people are reminded that they were once slaves in Egypt. It is used to explain the Sabbath, or maybe just to explain why servants get to have Sabbath too in Ancient Israelite society. It is used in the commandments to take care of the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner as well. Basically, the people are reminded time and time again to have compassion for the vulnerable because they were once a vulnerable population.

However, there aren’t many stories about the people being enslaved in Egypt, this is one of the few. The ones that exist all revolve around Moses, and this story is the prelude to the story of Moses’ birth. It is very difficult to tell if there is any authentic memory underneath this story, because it is an old enough story that there really shouldn’t be and yet there are such epically profound truths in it about what it means to be an oppressed people and what subversiveness looks like from within oppression that it feels more true than most stories in the Bible. This story may not be a factual accounting of a particular incident in history, but because it contains so many larger truths, I’m going to treat it as if it is, and let it speak for itself.

According to the end of Genesis, the descendants of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob had all moved down to Egypt during a famine after Joseph had become the right hand person to the Pharaoh. Joseph had urged them to come down, where he could ensure that they would have sufficient food and land to be safe. The story explained that Joseph had interpreted the Pharaoh’s dream and predicted 7 years of excellent harvests followed by 7 years of famine. Pharaoh was so pleased that he elevated Joseph to the 2^nd highest office in the land, and while there Joseph reigned over an agricultural policy that completely impoverished the entire nation and brought their wealth into the Pharaoh’s hands. The people ended up selling their livestock, their land, and then themselves for access to Joseph’s grain stores.

So the same guy who “saved” his family did so while utterly destroying the people of the nation he was – supposedly – serving. The new Pharaoh “didn’t know Joseph” (the Bible suggests this story happened 400 years later, so that would be reasonable). However, it is a bit ironic that the Hebrews were enslaved by the people who one of their forefathers had masterminded enslaving.

Perhaps that suggests that oppression breeds oppression, and oppressors should be careful. In any case, by the premises of this story, by this time the Egyptians were in full fledge oppressor roles and the Hebrews were enslaved by them and oppressed by them.

In our Bible Study we were struck by the similarities between the story in Exodus and the experiences of slaves here in the United States. There is something universal about this story, and it strikes cords through the eons.

Puah and Shiphrah are midwives who are given an immoral order. They are to kill all the baby boys of their people. The names Puah and Shiphrah are classically Hebrew names, and the text reminds us that they’re Hebrew as well as mentioning twice that they are in awe of God. (The “awe” is often translated “fear” but “awe” is a much better translation.) We are not supposed to miss that they’re Hebrew, or that they’re being ordered to kill the boys of their own ethnic group.

It took me entirely too long to figure out why the boys were to be killed. I was thinking of males as especially strong laborers in the fields, and wondered why you’d want to have fewer of them. If you wanted fewer descendants, I thought, why not kill the girls who have the babies and leave the workers? Our Bible Study participants responded that the death of the male babies meant that the females would be sexually available to the Egyptians, and they’d presume that as half-Egyptian – the next generation would be more pliable and “better.” The participants in the Bible Study figured this out by considering American slave history.

We also noticed the language of fear created around the oppressed group, and the dehumanization of them. The Hebrews are called “powerful” and “numerous” and the myth is that they would do harm for the Egyptians, a myth used to justify enslaving them. It is suggested that they could be spies, or fight against Egypt in a war, or abandon their posts of much needed labor. Therefore, the myth of the oppressors says, we must enslave them and double down on the harm we do to them to keep them below us.

Oppression is very powerful, and human oppressors are capable of extensive harm, but there is a resiliency to life itself, and it fights back when life is oppressed. This story says that the more the Hebrews were oppressed the more they multiplied. I think we’re supposed to believe this was God’s hand at work; I think it is more the myth of the Egyptians continuing to justify evil. In any case, both the Hebrews of this story and the African American slaves oppressed in the United States suffered great losses as a community – losses of life and identity, language and culture, dignity and hope. Yet, the communities found ways to fight back, reform, and try again and again. This story suggests that the power to do so came from God, as do many of the songs and stories that remain from the American slave era. God supports the experience of the oppressed in overcoming oppression.

The midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, were unusual women. It doesn’t seem reasonable that only two midwives could have been sufficient for all the births of the Hebrew women, so more likely they were the LEADERS of the midwives. It may even be that they were also midwives to the Egyptian women, as they imply they know the difference between each set of women giving birth. They are BRILLIANT, DEFIANT, and seemingly FEARLESS (although I’d stake a bet that they were terrified even while they kept their cool.)

They are given a direct order by the most powerful man in their country to kill the baby boys of their community and they don’t! If it is true that they were the leaders of the midwives, they give counter instructions. In any case, the voices of all the midwives are united in the shared voices of Puah and Shiphrah, and their voices respond to this immoral command with “no.” They just don’t! It makes me wonder how they had been formed as humans, and what empowered them to know better. The text says it was that they knew God, and I hope it is true for all who know God that our relationship with God empowers us to refuse to follow unjust orders, but I’ve seen it go other ways. How is it that knowing the Holy One can form us into people who more deeply believe in the sacredness of life? How is that being present to God helps us overcome our fears of the powers of the world? How were the midwives able to be so brave? I wish I knew, but for now I’ll accept the premise that God can help us overcome our fears and resist the power of oppression.

Did the midwives refuse the Pharaoh because he was Egyptian? Because the order was so atrocious? Because someone had already been training them on resisting oppression? Was it about who gave it, how terrible it was, or about who they were? How were they strong enough to simply refuse? And how were they wise enough NOT to say “no” to the Pharaoh (who would have killed them and replaced them with someone who would do what he said) but instead to simply not to it? I’d love to know, but for now I’ll accept the premise that God helped them overcome the power of the oppressor.

When they get called back to account for the live baby Israelite boys, they have a crafty answer in hand. They give a compliment to the femininity of the Egyptian women while using the fear of the Hebrews and assumptions about them to their benefit. They respond along the lines of “your women are more feminine and fragile while ours are more like animals.” To be precise, they say, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.” You see? The answer they give manipulates the Pharaoh by complimenting his ethnic group and denigrating theirs, and it is believable to him. They save their boys. To do it they have to imply terrible things about the lack of humanity of the women they were related to, and they did because it was totally worth it.

Puah and Shiphrah aren’t the only ones in history who have played the assumptions of oppressors against the oppressors to gain freedom for the oppressed, but they did it as well as anyone.

Now, the incredible actions of these subversive women to save the lives of Israelite boys ended with things worse off than they started – sort of. The midwives had been told to kill the babies, the tactics then were supposed to be somewhat hidden and covert. Their actions forced his hand to make the death sentence to baby boys OVERT and visible. He continues to order the death of the baby boys, and he makes everyone responsible for it, since he hadn’t been able to control the midwives. In the short term, that meant more babies died.

But in the long term, it meant that the Hebrews lived. The overt action of the Pharaoh led to more subversive actions – by Moses’ mother and sister – and by Pharaoh’s own daughter. The fear of Pharaoh that led to his orders for murder resulted in Moses being raised in his own house – an Israelite boy who he had ordered killed. When Pharaoh raised the stakes it ended up backfiring on him and he eventually lost all his slaves.

It seems important to take note of how it must have felt to be Puah and Shiphrah in the moment when Pharaoh ordered the Hebrew babies to be thrown into the Nile. It would have felt like failure, right? They took risks with their own lives and likely the lives of those who worked with them to save the babies. They took morality and the love of God more seriously than the power of the Pharaoh/King. They fought with their wits about them for the well-being of their people and they won…

Until the Pharaoh made it worse and raised the stakes. They tried to save those baby boys and allow them to live, and then Pharaoh orders everyone to kill the baby boys and the organizational methods of the midwives can’t protect the babies anymore. Puah and Shiphrah must have been dismayed. Yet, the tactics they used ended up in one generation with the freedom of their people – instead of the death of the males of a generation and the rape of that generation’s women. Yes, things got worse. That’s what happens when you fight back against oppression. The oppressors make things worse first. Which means that when women – and men – are forced to use subversive tactics they have to be prepared for things to get much worse before they get better.

In The United Methodist Church right now, things are getting worse. The many brave people who have refused to follow unjust rules in the church have upset the status quo. Those who are committed to excluding LGBTQ people from full participation in the Body of Christ are furious that they can’t make people follow the rules. As they double-down on exclusion and tightening rules and punishments, they push the UMC toward schism. This weekend in Chicago a group of 1700 people deeply committed to exclusion gathered, and formally launched a para-Church structure they are calling the Wesleyan Covenant Association. Their first demand is that the Church end the resistance to exclusion once and for all. Since we all know that the progressives fighting for inclusion will not be silenced that is not possible. They suggest, that if resistance can’t be silenced that a plan needs to be developed to divide the denomination. Things are getting worse.

That means we are on the road to ending oppression. Thanks be to God for the midwives and all those willing and able to follow their lead. What a joy it is, in God’s holy name, to be part of ending oppression in any form. Amen

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

October 9, 2016

Sermons

“Persistent” based on Luke 18:2-5

October 2, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I recently heard a story,
it was the story of the person who told it to me, but it struck me
that it was also many peoples’ story. There was much to celebrate
in the story, and also a lot to be frustrated by. The person who
told me the story was someone who lacks access to sufficient
financial resources. That is, in the colloquial – he is poor –
although I think poverty is more complicated than that! The man is a
father, and his daughter got into a VERY good college, despite the
challenges the family faced and the challenges their school district
faced. As you might hope, the very good college offered this young
woman a financial aid package to make it possible for her to attend
the school. However, when the young woman got the financial aid
package and read it over carefully, she realized that the loans she
was being offered were predatory loans that would be verging on
impossible to ever be able to pay back! She contacted the school.
They ignored her. She kept pestering. They kept ignoring her. Her
father started calling, and he started calling up the chain of
command. He was told to stop calling. When I heard the story,
that’s where it ended – they were unsure if the young woman would
attend the very good college because she was WAY too smart to do so
at risk to her financial future.

She sounds like the
persistent widow. I’ve been told that the persistent widow is a very
strange character with which to start a sermon series on subversive
women – and not just because the Bible presents her as fictional.
The bigger issue is that her subversiveness isn’t very obvious. To
the naked eye, she just looks like an annoying nag! Actually, even
that may be projection. This is a SHORT story, there isn’t that much
to it!

In our study of the text
though, we found a lot to discuss about this short-storied,
fictional, persistent widow. It is helpful to remember that the
Torah, the laws of community life that the Jewish people understood
to have come from God, were very clear about the care for widows,
orphans, and foreigners. That would be, people who did not have the
protection of an adult male who was a member of society and were thus
vulnerable. The system was designed so that even the vulnerable
could find ways to survive. The Torah was also very clear about the
threat to society created by an unjust justice system, and
articulated frequently, in no uncertain terms, the need to have
judges who made rulings based on JUSTICE and not on who had more
money or influence.

That is, the persistent
widow is stuck in a situation she shouldn’t be in. She should be
cared for. She isn’t! It is likely that her “opponent” is the
person who should have been taking care of her and providing for her
livelihood, and wasn’t! The justice system was supposed to help her
find a way to justice. It didn’t. She was stuck in a situation
which was untenable for her survival without a means of recourse
because of the immorality of the judge. There was no other means by
which she could get justice. The system was closed to her, and the
only option left to her was to agitate the system.

The judge is presented
very simplistically. He doesn’t care about justice, people, or
God… and it sounds like he just does what he wants to do. He is a
negative caricature of a person abusing power or authority, someone
who isn’t easy to move toward justice.

The persistent widow won
though! I suspect that she could have taught the courses I took this
spring on non-violent direct action! Jesus says that the judge
thought to himself,
“because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice,
so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.” (v. 5) The
persistent widow didn’t have much power to use in the world, and she
didn’t have ANY power that could be used without being annoying. So
she used what she had. She was annoying. She didn’t give up. And
she annoyed him into doing what was right!

That’s
what I think is so subversive about the persistent widow. She can’t
have been the only widow in that city who was impoverished by a lack
of justice, she likely wasn’t even the only one to bring it to the
judge’s attention. MANY of the widows might have been in similar
situations. However, in cases like that, most people give up.
That’s what people are counting on, and that’s part of why injustices
sometimes win out.

I
think about that young college bound woman, and how carefully she
read the details of her financial aid package to determine that the
offer wasn’t fair. How many other people in the same situation come
with some trust that the college they want to go to won’t do them
harm, don’t read the package, or don’t yet have the math skills to
interpret the implications? How many people would decide to take the
package and hope for the best? How many people would try to call and
ask if there was another loan, but give up easily? I don’t know how
many people would get as far as the young woman I heard about, and
consider giving up their dream school, but I do know that her
persistence is NOT what the predatory loan company is counting on.

The
predatory loan company is expecting people not to pay attention, to
trust, to take a leap of faith, not to run the numbers, and to sign
on the dotted line – no matter how high the interest rate turns out
to be. The predatory loan company is able to get away with their
loans because few people are as persistent as that young woman. The
college, as well, choose to work with that predatory loan company,
and in doing so to keep this young woman and those in similar
situations IN poverty, while pretending to help them out of it. It
makes me wonder what they might be getting out of it.

Keeping
our eyes open to see
the injustices of the wold and REFUSING to be quiet about them once
we do is wildly subversive. I’m claiming the persistent widow was
subversive because she was a nag, and she didn’t stop nagging until
justice was found. It isn’t the wildest story in the Bible by any
means, but it may represent the most frequently successful mechanism
of accessing justice: refusing to give up!

One
of the challenges of acting like the persistent widow, though, is
that there are a lot of injustices in the world and none of us can
give attentiveness to all of them. That level of nagging can’t be
multi-tasked! This is one of the reasons I am so grateful for the
image of the Body of Christ. I come back to it time and time again,
reminded that if I do my part faithfully, and trust the rest of the
Body to do their part (and God to do God’s part), the whole world
gets better. Most often justice comes through collective action
(think Montgomery Bus Boycott, Women’s Suffrage, blocking the
Keystone XL pipeline), but sometimes they’re smaller or individual as
well. On occasion we can successfully seek justice alone, but no one
of us can seek ALL justice. If any of us try to
all the work of the Body of Christ, nothing gets done
at all!

My
college thesis was on John Conway’s “Game of Life,” which is a
set of rules governing a grid. On the grid, at any given moment,
each cell is “alive” or “dead” and then, from there, things
change. The status “alive” or “dead” is represented visually
by two different colors, and those statuses are able to change with
time, based on the relationships they have with other cells who are
also “alive” or “dead.”

One
night, deep in the trenches of trying to write up my thesis and
struggling with a decision about where to go to seminary, I went down
to the river to pray. I sat on a dock and watched the water flow by.
As might make sense if you’d spent as many hours and months staring
at colored boxes on a graph as I had, I started imagining the river
as the graph – and imagining the graph spreading out to cover all
the water of the world. I’d stared at colored boxes for a LONG time,
and I was tired 😉 Then, as I continued to pray, ponder, and be
overwhelmed, I started imagining one of those boxes as representing
MY life. To my horror, the box that represented my life was
blinking! I took this to mean that sometimes my life was
contributing to the well-being of others, but sometimes it WASN’T! I
found myself sitting on that dock on the Connecticut River, aware
that sometimes I wasn’t benefiting the kin-dom of God and wishing
with all that I was that I could ALWAYS be good.

It
was at that point that another thought entered my mind, one that was
outside of the particular ways my thoughts tend to cycle around.
That process has been one I’ve associated with the Divine, and I have
since thought of that prayer time by the river as a vision of sorts
-but I’m also giving you the details to consider it so that you can
assess how you’d like to think about it. The thought that entered my
mind, seemingly from beyond me, was that if I could manage to be a
blessing that contributed to the well-being of the kindom 51% of the
time, that was ENOUGH for God to be able to expand the goodness out
into the world and to be a net gain to the kin-dom.

It
was certainly a new thought to me then, I’d leaned more towards
perfectionism than toward an idea that offering more good than bad
was a net gain! It is a thought I’ve gone back to in the years
since, particularly when I’ve found myself being extra rough on
myself. It helps me to consider that God is able to make things work
with what we’re able to offer.

If
we do our best, and especially if we are able to offer a bit more
good into the world than harm, then God can use what we offer in
combination with the rest of the Body of Christ. The world becomes a
safer, fuller, more just place. The kin-dom becomes. We don’t have
to do all the work! We can’t! We’d burn out. That means that
sometimes we have to work through the process of figuring out which
things are ours to do and which things we leave for the rest of the
Body of Christ. Together, each of us offering the love, compassion,
and persistence that are our gifts from God, we can follow the
widow’s course and create the world that the Torah dreams and God
wants – the kin-dom of God! And it doesn’t even require perfection
😉 Just persistence. Thanks be to God. Amen

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hershttp://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

October 2, 2016