“An Audacious Gift” based on Deuteronomy 15:1-18 and Mark…

April 2, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Before
we can examine this story of a woman anointing Jesus’s head, we have
to separate out what the story is from what it isn’t. Much like the
Christmas stories of Luke and Matthew being subconsciously melded
(FYI: Luke has shepherds, Matthew has magi, no one has both!), the
multiple versions of this story have been conflated into a rather
confusing whole. Each gospel tells of Jesus, at a meal, interrupted
by a woman giving him an extravagant gift. Each gospel indicates
that someone(s) is horrified by it, and leads to Jesus responding,
“The poor you will always have with you” and informing us that
her story has now become an intricate part of his story.

Matthew
and Mark tell the same story, so there are three stories get
conflated. Here are the relevant pieces: in LUKE, and only in Luke,
the woman is named as a sinner; in JOHN, and only in John, the woman
is Mary (sister of Martha and Lazarus); in Luke and John Jesus’ feet
are anointed whereas in Matthew and Mark his head is anointed; the
whole wiping his feet with hair and tears thing is unique to Luke;
the objector is Judas in John while it is the pharisees in Luke, some
people in Mark, and the disciples in Matthew; and in Luke an extra
parable is thrown in as part of Jesus’ counter objection.

As
the Jesus Seminar puts it, “In all probability, the story of a
woman intruder anointing Jesus during a symposium (dinner or males)
took various forms as it was related in the oral tradition,”¹
and “The Fellows of the Jesus Seminar were of the opinion that the
original form of the story is beyond recovery.”²

Which
is to say, there are three stories based on something that might have
happened, which are each told to make their own points. Today we’re
looking at Mark’s story, and we’re going to derive meaning from
Mark’s story. One of the great benefits of having various versions
of a story is that we can assume they’ve each developed to offer us
different – and necessary – points of view and lessons.

In
Mark, Jesus’ head is anointed. According to The Jewish Annotated New
Testament, “Jesus is anointed; the
action could be either that of anointing a king or of preparing a
body for burial. Mark’s principle of irony would suggest both.”³
The story comes 2 days before Passover in Mark, giving an easy
connection to the need to anoint his body before his burial
(especially since it wouldn’t be anointed after his burial).
However, that also means that it comes after the Palm Sunday parade
in which Jesus’ actions claim the kingship of Israel. Thus it fits
well as an affirmation of his role as Messiah, a symbolism very
important to the early Christians who would have passed this story
along. I agree with the Jewish Annotated New Testament, I think the
implication is very intentionally both and: kingship and burial.

Now,
this unnamed subversive woman broke into an all male dinner party,
one to which she was inherently not welcome. She broke in to offer
an extravagant and intimate gift to Jesus. The alabaster jar of a
very costly ointment of nard was likely imported from the Himalayas,⁴
and was more commonly used a few drops at a time. I’m guessing, sort
of like a new car, that once the jar was opened the value decreased
significantly. This unnamed woman opened the jar and poured it ALL
onto Jesus’ head. Mark says that this is a gesture made with
fragrant ointment worth about $15,000.

As
Pheme Perkins puts it in the New Interpreter’s Bible,
“The
expansive gesture, breaking and pouring out the entire vial of
expensive ointment rather than using a few drops, forms a foil to the
cheapness of Jesus’ life in the eyes of those who seek to destroy
him.”⁵
SNAP. Wow. This unnamed woman is presented as understanding Jesus’
ministry, passion, purpose, and value. In particular, she’s
presented as understanding what the disciples do not. Perkins says,
“The
nameless woman’s gestures shows that Jesus’ followers still do not
grasp the necessity of his passion.”⁶
(The passion in this case being the more formal definition of his
suffering and death.) She stands in contrast to the men. Her action
indicates a profound understanding of what is happening, while they
remain in denial. Their RESPONSES to her action indicate exactly how
deep that denial runs.

They
respond with objections, suggesting that her action was an
inappropriate use of resources. I don’t believe them. I think they
were jealous of her wisdom, or infuriated at her audacity in
breaking into their dinner, or ashamed they hadn’t thought to respond
with such vulnerability, or just annoyed with the drama, or maybe all
of it. I think they were displeased with this woman, and her
presence at their dinner, and her grand gesture and they found some
justification from their displeasure and projected it. I think this
because I’ve been human for a while now, and I know that’s how I
work, and my reading suggests I’m not alone! We feel things, and
then we justify them. The disciples with Jesus that night did it.
They felt annoyed, jealous, ashamed, or something uncomfortable and
they justified it by condemning this woman’s profound and generous
gesture and proclaiming that she was acting unrighteously.

They suggest that the vial
should have been sold and the money given to the poor. This is how
we know they really didn’t get it. Jesus has been teaching them
about kin-dom values for quite a while, but they still stand in the
normal values of the world. They see the expensive ointment and
assign to it a monetary value. The woman looked at resource she had,
and used it for the best possible use. Here’s the thing, at some
point, if it is not to be wasted, an expensive container of perfumed
ointment will be used, right? I mean, it is possible that it could
be bought and sold for years or decades on end, and I suspect it
would eventually even lose value in aging (who knows, I could be
wrong), but in the end the purpose of it is to be USED. So, if it was
going to be used someday, what better day and what better person than
Jesus?

The
unnamed woman uses what she has to acknowledge his importance
(anointing of kings), to respond to his faithfulness (which would get
him killed), and to prepare him for burial (a gift he received only
from her). By using it on Jesus, she implies that there is no higher
purpose for this gift than to anoint Jesus. By using on Jesus, she
implies that she understands that the time of his death was
impending, and she wanted to ease his terrible journey.

It is a profound gift. Selling
the ointment so that someone else had it and could use it some other
day for some other person, even to give the proceeds to the poor,
would have valued Jesus less.

The
disciples were still in denial about the imminent death of Jesus, I
think that’s the core of why they responded so poorly to her action.
They didn’t want it to be true. However, this woman – whoever she
was – was willing to face reality. When Jesus speaks of her, and
says her action will be told, there is another irony. Her action is
told, but her name is not. As The
Jewish Annotated Bible
puts it, “The
anointing will be told in remembrance of her,
but her name is not given. Perhaps the omission of her name is
ironic: the unnamed ‘everywoman’ understands him, while the named
disciples, the authority figures of old (from the author’s point of
view), do not.”⁷

Now,
the named objection
to her action is in the care of the poor, and commentators believe
that Jesus’ answer was a reference to Deuteronomy 15:11⁸,
a portion of the text we read this morning about the Sabbatical year
which was aimed to prevent generational cycles of poverty. It says,
“Since
there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore
command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your
land.’” Perkins takes this a bit further, saying, “Jesus
points out that the Law (Deut 15:11) makes everyone responsible for
helping the poor. If the poor are in desperate need, then this
woman’s failure to donate the cost of the ointment is neither the
cause nor the cure.”⁹
I would agree. The whole of society was aimed at enriching the
already wealthy and powerful on the backs of the poor and powerless.
One charitable action would not have transformed that system. On the
other hand, she guided Jesus on his way to death, and his death and
resurrection have been significant in transforming society (even if
the process is still ongoing).

I’ve
always struggled with that one line in this story, about the poor
always being with us. It has felt like a contrast to the vision of
the kindom, and the values of the Sermon on the Mount. It has felt
like giving up on the world as it should be. However, the referenced
verse, in context, sounds much different. Instead of passively
accepting poverty as a part of the economy of the world, the
Deuteronomy passage aims to minimize extreme poverty, AND AT THE SAME
TIME admits that no system will be perfect. Thus it calls for
compassion and generosity as well. The whole of the Torah seeks to
create a just society, in particular by giving each family access to
land the freedom to benefit from its wealth. However, it knows that
widows, orphans, and foreigners will not benefit like everyone else,
and so it finds ways to care for them too. In this context, it
sounds more like Jesus saying, “life will never be totally fair,
and some people will always be on the bottom, but create a fair
system anyway and take care of those who struggle in that system
too.” Its a bit different than the verse I’ve tried to make sense
of for all these years.

To
return to this profound, subversive, audacious, and compassionate
woman, I wonder what it would be like to follow in her footsteps.
She listened well, and maybe not even to Jesus. We don’t know that
they’d met. It may simply be that she knew the ways of the world and
could read the signs of the days and could tell what was coming. But
she listened, even to the unpleasantness, and she found a way to
respond.

I
think some of us are more like this woman than we are like other
Biblical characters. The most likely explanation for her having a
very expensive container of perfumed ointment is that she was
wealthy. Like many generous donors around here, she choose to use
some of what she had because it was exactly what was needed at that
moment. Unlike in his response to the “wealthy young man,” Jesus
doesn’t ask for all that she had, he simply accepts the gift that she
gives.

She
uses what she has for the kindom of God, and the vision of Jesus.
Its value in her eyes is its usefulness to Jesus, not the resale
value! What a wonderful way to think of our resources – both the
physical ones and time, energy, passion, and labor we have to give.
Whatever the market value of them may be, the most important
usefulness of them is in loving God and loving our neighbors.
Figuring that out may not be simple, linear, or obvious, but will
always be wonderful. May we figure it out! Amen

1Robert
W. Funk, Roy W Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar The Five Gospels:
The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (HarperOneUSA,
1993), 115.

2Funk
et al, 116.

3The
Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version Bible
Translation,
edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 88.

4The
Jewish Annotated New Testament, 88.

5Pheme
Perkins “Mark” in The New Interpreter’s Bible Vol. 8
(Nashville: Abingdon Press,
1995), 698.

6Perkins,
698.

7The
Jewish Annotated New Testament, 88-89.

8Funk
et al, 116.

9Perkins,
699.

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

“Woman at the Well, With a Twist”based on1 Kings…

March 26, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

When I was in seminary, I had the great privilege of interning at the Hollywood United Methodist Church. That church had a deep commitment to the people in its community, a thirst for a deeper faith and ways of following Jesus, incredible diversity, and joy that in being community to each other AND whoever showed up. They were wonderful teachers and in two years of being in ministry with them, my heart and mind grew.

I often took public transportation to Hollywood, which meant that I emerged from the subway onto the Walk of Fame next to Mann’s Chinese Theater. It was one long block south of the church. If you haven’t been there, then you might not know that the Hollywood Walk of Fame is an intriguing combination of tourists, people dressed up as cartoon characters, people paid minimum wage to hand out leaflet advertisements for clubs and tours, and…. most annoyingly of all… evangelists.

It was my practice to ignore the evangelists. They were usually new Christians who were part of mega-churches from some state far away, expressing their new-found devotion by trying to terrify others into believing in Jesus. While I found them to be the most annoying part of my commute, I kept my head down, and kept moving.

My last semester of seminary, however, we had an exchange student. He was a college junior who had been raised in a conservative evangelical tradition, and he mentioned that he didn’t know how deconstruct the argument that the street-evangelists made. So a bunch of us went to Hollywood: 3 last semester seminarians, 1 very interested college exchange student, and the seminary dean; to be evangelized.

We were accosted as soon as we emerged from the subway. It was so easy to deconstruct their arguments that I felt a little bit guilty doing it, like we were teasing a hungry child by putting food out of their reach. However, the young man needed to know, so we played. Their argument was developed in this way: they sought to establish that we had “sinned” in some simplistic way (lying, stealing, etc), they meant to inform us that our sin condemned us to hell, and then they intended to establish that the only way to avoid hell was by professing specific words about Jesus. If there was a plan after that I don’t know it, we started messing with them on step one 😉 Eventually I admitted to being a pastor at the church which was visible from the corner, and they got even more confused. (After all, I’m female.) I fear we may have even messed up their new-found, overly simplistic, faith.

Most of the time, when reading a dialogue between Jesus and religious authorities, it feels like Jesus is playing with them in the way that we (the overly theologically educated) played with the street evangelists. Jesus terrifies and stumps the Pharisees, Sadducees, priests, and scribes whenever he talks to them. The religious authorities of the day were presumably brilliant men who had spent their lifetimes studying the Torah and seeking to know God. Jesus doesn’t even appear to exert any effort in beating them at their own game. He’s GOOD. He’s the master. He wins every round with the religious authorities and doesn’t even break a sweat – well, at least according the Gospels, books written to make him look good 😉

I don’t think we can fully appreciate this story without remembering how effective Jesus is at deconstructing the arguments of the wisest scholars of his day. Jesus treated her as a partner, and equal, and enjoyable conversation partner. He didn’t aim to stump her, terrify her, or silence her. He spoke to her without an audience. It wasn’t a competition. It was a conversation.

The Samaritan woman was the opposite of a religious authority. She had no formal religious education, she was female, she wasn’t considered “Jewish,” she was part of a hated group of “others,” she was an unmarried adult woman, she may well have been socially ostracized from the other women in her village, and compared to just about everyone she was powerless. We don’t know for sure if she was socially ostracized, scholars and preachers have been deriving it for centuries from the fact that she was at the well at noon, when the women gathered to get water at dawn and dusk when it would be coolest to do so. Being at the well at noon MAY suggest that she was trying to avoid the other women, who may have been pretty mean to her.

We also don’t really know her marital status or its significance. Jesus says she’s been married 5 times and “the one you have now is not your husband.” The way I see it, there are two possibilities for this: one is that she is having an affair with someone else’s husband and the other is that she is living with a man who she is not having sex with. However, as Jesus doesn’t seem particularly INTERESTED in this fact, he just names it and moves on, we are going to as well. If she’s “been married” 5 times than either she’s been a widow many times, she’s had men divorce her and leave her without financial recourse many times, or some combination of the two. The few facts we know suggest her life was very difficult.

She is a person on the margins in many intersecting ways. If you defined where power and privilege lived in that society and then you took its opposite, she’d be sitting in the position of its opposite. In Judah, in Jerusalem, in Jewish society, the chief priests and scribes sat in the middle of power. When Jesus interacts with those who have power and privilege he decreases their power. When Jesus interacts with those who have no power and privilege he increases their power. He lives the verse from Isaiah (40:4) that says, “Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.”

There are two other super important pieces of context that we need to review before we can look more deeply at this text. However, they’re both much shorter than my first point 😉 One is location. The text says that Jesus “had to go through Samaria,” but that’s simply not true. Jews who were traveling from Judah to Galilee did not go through Samaria. They went around, even though it would be as convenient as driving from here to Ohio without driving in Pennsylvania. However, that’s how people did it. So no one who heard the story in early times would have believed the “he had to” go through Samaria. He CHOOSE to go through Samaria. That’s the sort of crazy, out of the norm, guy Jesus was. This conversation is said to happen at the well at Sychar, which means that it was near a historical location of Samaritan worship AND at a historic well dating back to Jacob (as mentioned in the story). The conversation about appropriate places to worship God is placed in a particularly apt location.

Finally, we need to remember what happens when a woman and a man meet at a well. Throughout Genesis there is a less than subtle theme whereby a meeting at the well means a marriage is about to take place. Issac’s wife Rebecca is found at a well. Jacob meets Rachel at a well. By the time you’ve read Genesis (as the Young Adult Bible Study did last year), every time you hear “well”, you hear wedding bells. Setting up Jesus and the disempowered Samaritan woman to meet alone at a well seems to open the door for flirtation, or a romantic interlude, or the possibility of an impending marriage that would horrify everyone who heard of it. (So, it sounds like Jesus.)

Jesus is sitting by this well, and an unnamed woman from the village comes out to draw water. Jesus initiates conversation with her by saying, “Give me a drink.” Now, this is how all the other well stories begin, so it is consistent, except for ALL the social barriers that exist between them. So she calls him out on it – she asks him, essentially, if this is really want he wants to do. By speaking to her, he is acknowledging her humanity, and breaking rules that kept unrelated men and women as well as Jews and Samaritans apart. She responses with grace, making sure is willing to take the risk involved in being seen speaking to her. This woman responds to Jesus by trying to take care of HIM, and his reputation.

Now, it is very clear throughout this interaction that the writer of the Gospel of John is interesting in making his points about who Jesus is, ad he does so by having Jesus say the things he wants said. However, we’re going to take them as they’re written, because we have no other source for this story. They pontificate about water, and then Jesus has his famous line about her husbands. The really interesting part starts after that. The woman doesn’t argue with him, nor is she silenced by him. She doesn’t apologize, actually, she doesn’t even respond directly! She uses what he’s said as an opening for the question that represents the BIG HUGE ELEPHANT near the well. She uses it as a transition. She says, “Ah! From what you know of me, you must be a prophet. So, then, prophet, help me understand. My people have worshipped God on this mountain, but YOUR people say that God can only be worshipped in the Temple in Jerusalem. Are you really going to stand at the base of the mountain where we have worshipped for generations and tell me that our worship is invalid? You came here, when others don’t come here. What do you mean by it?”

This, my friends, is why so many members of Congress are afraid to have Town Hall meetings, because of constituents like this woman! But Jesus is the one who helps to empower the disempowered, and he answers her as if this is the question he came hoping to hear! His answer is radical, and transformational for the faith of the Samaritans, the Jews, AND the Gentiles. He responds that God is everywhere, and can be worshipped everywhere, and that in order to connect with God one most only worship in “spirit and truth.” He throws away the power of the Temple and the chief priests, and gives it back to the people. (Almost as if this is a theme of his 😉 )

Once she hears THIS answer, she starts to get seriously curious about this man who is breaking all the boundaries, and she opens the door for him to reveal his true nature. (She is the first to hear it from him.) She believes him and runs off to tell all the people who had judged and excluded her about the good news. It even leads one to wonder if the reason Jesus went to Samaria, and the reason Jesus sat alone by the well, was to find a person who could help him connect with the Samaritans. Seems reasonable, right?

She goes out and tells all of her neighbors about what Jesus said and did, and they believed her and came to him. He taught them for days! She opened up the door for Jesus to engage with people he couldn’t access on his own. She’s often been called the first evangelist, which means the first one to share the good news on Jesus’ behalf, and I think that’s fair. I also think is worth noting that she shared GOOD NEWS, and unlike those street evangelists on the streets of Hollywood, she did not attempt to frighten anyone into loving God and listening to Jesus.

It seems, as the story ends, that Jesus wasn’t seeking a wife. He was seeking a partner in ministry, someone to open a door to which he didn’t have a key. He was open to the one willing to do it for him, and she was willing to take great risks for him. She is presented as kind, considerate, wise, deep, and honest. What a woman!

While there are many take-aways that could be drawn from this unnamed woman, I think the way to follow Jesus in this story comes directly from Jesus. We too live in a world where the powerful keep gaining power and the powerless keep losing power. The system sustains itself without anyone even trying, and there are a lot of people trying to keep the status quo in place anyway.

To follow Jesus is to refuse that system! It is to allow those in power to lose power and those without power to gain it. It is to see those who are least like us as being most important to us. It is to argue convincingly against the authorities who would do harm, and allow ourselves to be bested by those who rarely get heard at all. To follow Jesus is to turn inside out and upside down the values of the world, and believe deeply in that each and every person is a beloved child of God. May we learn his lessons and follow his twisty example! Amen

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

Sermons

“Indictment of the Temple”based on Deuteronomy 6:4-5; Leviticus 19:18;…

March 20, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Home Missioner Kevin M. Nelson and Rev. Sara E. BaronFirst United Methodist Church of Schenectady603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305http://fumcschenectady.org/For
us, the primary question is, “Why did Jesus overturn the tables in
the Temple?” We were both raised with one explanation, and have
come to believe another one entirely!

A
man named Rabbi Hillel was said to live an extraordinarily long life,
born around 110 BCE, about a century before Jesus’ birth, and lived
into Jesus’ early years, around 10-20 CE. His primary rival
in thought was Shammai. Once, they say, a Gentile approached Hillel
and Shammai and challenged them to explain the Torah to him while he
stood on one foot. Shammai dismissed the man. Hillel accepted the
question but gently chastised the man by responding, “What is
hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole of the
Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.”^¹If this brings to
mind anything Jesus said, I don’t think it is a coincidence.

The
Gospel of Mark records an episode that rings similar to that
experienced by Shammai and Hillel. This happens during the testing of
Jesus’ teachings and authority in the days that followed the Temple
episode that my mother-in-law, Joan, read a few minutes ago. In it,
Jesus was asked which commandment is the greatest. Jesus answered
that the Shema ( this
morning’s Deuteronomy passage—love God with all your heart, soul,
mind and strength) is the
greatest, and loving our neighbor as ourselves
(this morning’s Leviticus passage read by my mother, Elizabeth)
is the second greatest.

These
commands are at the heart of how Jesus understood God’s nature; one
of love, justice and compassion, and they are central to the
individual and collective ways in which we are to live out our lives.
They are also going to be central to why Jesus was at the Temple on
the last Monday of his life. In order to explain this, let us provide
some more context.

Jesus
lived from around 4 BCE to around 30 CE. He was raised in Galilee,
an area that had been re-colonized by faithful Jews and was an
impoverished backwater of the Roman Empire. In particular, he grew
up in Nazareth, a tiny village that was 4 miles from the CITY of
Sepphoris. Sepphoris had been part of a revolt against the Roman
Empire in 4 BCE, in response to the death of Herod who had brutally
oppressed everyone under his reign. In response, the Empire had sent
in legions of troops to reconquer the city, leveling much of it, and
selling those who had led the revolt into slavery.^²

Did
you hear that? Approximately the year Jesus was born, the city under
whose shadow he was raised, was leveled by the Empire. It is even
likely that his father’s work was in rebuilding the city. The
revolt, and its aftermath, would have infiltrated his consciousness
in ways similar to kids born in 2001 in New York City.

The
Roman Empire was an empire in all of the traditional ways that
empires are empires. It existed to extract wealth from the people it
conquered in order to give the wealth to powerful elites. In his
book, “Jesus:
Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious
Revolutionary,” which
was chosen by the Intersectional Justice Committee for the January
book discussion, Marcus
Borg refers to the Roman Empire as a preindustrial agricultural
domination system. Domination systems emerged about 5000 years ago
when humans figured out how to produce metal and domesticate animals
(at roughly the same time). Domesticating animals enabled larger
scale agriculture and thus agricultural surplus and larger scale
societies. Surplus also meant enabling the existence of wealth,
which, when combined with larger societies, led to motivation for
domination, at a larger scale.^³

Preindustrial
agricultural domination looked something like devising systems
through which taxation enabled wealth to flow upward, thus causing
people to live on the edge of subsistence and not just poverty, but
indentured servitude and slavery. In other words, virtually everyone
who wasn’t part of the elite, was a peasant. Agriculture, and thus
land, was a family’s primary source of productivity. A bad year for
crops could lead to debt, and in a subsistence world, it was all but
impossible to produce enough to pay off debt
once a family fell into debt. As little as one
bad year for crops could lead to debt, potentially loss of your land
and indentured servitude in which you were working the same land but
now someone else owned it and gained the productivity from the
land and your labor.
As
little as two or three
bad years could lead to loss of land and slavery.^⁴

In
the system Jesus lived under, wealth was thus derived from farming
and the wealth flowed up to the ruler and his aristocrats. In fact,
between ½ and 2/3 of all
production ended up in the hands of the elite 1-2% of the society,
making them VERY wealthy. They used some of this wealth to maintain
armies in order to keep the wealth, and the role of religion was to
legitimate the concentration of wealth by claiming the ruler as
ruling by Divine will.^⁵
Some of this should sound familiar from either history class or the
newspaper. 😉

In
this system, the poor, who comprised at least 90% of the population,
worked very hard and died very young. Those who survived childhood
lived to an average age of 30. The production they engaged in
benefited the elites who tended to live to an average age of 70.
Now, the Roman Empire wasn’t unique at all. This was exactly the
same domination system that the proto-Israelites had encountered in
Egypt and from which they had experienced God leading them into
freedom. This was also the same domination system that their own
kings had often attempted to implement, although their kings were
kept a bit in check by the prophets CONSTANTLY calling them out.

This
system was well known, but it stood in marked contrast with the world
as envisioned by God, shared by Moses, articulated by the prophets,
and sought by the people. The vision laid out in the Torah starts by
giving each family access to their own land to farm. It is designed
carefully, intended to prevent any system where a group of people
could economically dominate any other people, and THUS intended to
prevent a situation where a peasant class could exist and be
dominated. The vision of God in the Torah involved each family
having access to land AND being able to reap its benefits. The
vision of God in the Torah requires making food accessible even to
widows, orphans, and foreigners – the only ones who wouldn’t have
access to land. The vision of God in the Torah requires sharing 10%
of food production in order to BOTH feed the priests AND feed the
hungry. The vision of God in the Torah aims to keep society level so
that no one dominates and no one is dominated. That is the faith of
the Jews.

That
is the faith that the Temple was built to support. The Temple stood
as a symbol of that faith, as a way to remember that faith, and as a
way to enact that faith. The Temple stood near but APART from the
King’s palace, with an intention to keep powers separate and
accountable.

The
Roman Empire preferred to keep local leadership in place when it took
over new areas. However, it made the leadership accountable to the
Empire and required that the leadership do the work of gathering up
the wealth of the people to “pay its taxes.” Furthermore, it
replaced “local” leadership as it deemed necessary to maintain
stability and keep the money flowing upward. To be clear, this means
Rome appointed the high priest, and the appointment lasted only so
long as Rome was pleased with him. From 6 CE to 66 CE, Rome appointed
18 high priests.^⁶
The Roman Empire wasn’t stupid. It knew that the real power in
Israel by the time of Jesus was in the Temple – there hadn’t been a
monarch in centuries. The power that the Temple derived from its
function and symbolism as the centerpiece of living out God’s vision
for a JUST society was thus co-opted for the sake of the domination
system and its insatiable hunger for greater wealth.

Thus,
the Temple that stood as an emblem and reinforcement of God’s
justice and compassion was co-opted by the preindustrial,
agricultural domination system of the Roman Empire.

The
Temple, meant to function as an equalizer, a seat of prayer, and the
home of the priests who taught about God’s vision was – by the time
of Jesus – being used to extract wealth from the peasants for
benefit of the already wealthy. Jesus, after his upbringing as a
peasant near the aftermath of a revolt, had a particularly high
awareness of this system and its brokenness. He was interested in
breaking the PERCIEVED power of the Temple which would decrease (or
break) its usefulness to those in the domination system who would
abuse it. And that brings us to today’s story.

Many
Christians, when they think of the seminal moment in Jesus’ life
and career, probably think of the Resurrection. In contrast, I
understand this
story, the story of the indictment of the Temple, to be the seminal
moment of Jesus’ career.

In
the version we read in Mark, Jesus and his followers enter the Temple
and begin what I would recognize as a disruptive act. They knock over
the tables and throw out the vendors
and the money changers. For most of our lives, we have probably heard
this story in a way similar to a summary provided by biblical scholar
N.T. Wright in his book, Mark
for Everyone.
“Many people have thought that Jesus was simply protesting against
commercialization. On this view, he only intended to clean up the
Temple—to stop all this non-religious activity, and leave it as a
place for pure prayer and worship.”^⁷

In
Borg’s book he reminds us that the courtyard of the Temple was 40
acres! This simple fact gives us reason to question the narrative
we’ve been taught. To create a notable disruption within a space
that large would require intentionality, a plan, and many people!
Thus, this can’t have been a temper-tantrum response to commercial
activity. That opens up the question even wider: why did Jesus PLAN
a disruption at the Temple?

But
first, was this REALLY a disruption? Through Sara’s subversive
women of the Bible sermon series, we’ve been talking about
subversive actions for months, and this is classic subversive
activism 101—staging a disruption. Mark affirms this by sandwiching
this episode in between the two halves of the fig tree story, using
the fig tree as a symbol
for the Temple. In that story, the morning before the Temple
episode, as Jesus and his followers are on their way to the Temple,
Jesus notes that a fig tree has not produced any fruit and curses it,
never mind that figs were out of season.
The NRSV version of the Bible titles the concluding section, “The
Lesson From the Withered Fig Tree.” In it, when
they pass by that fig tree
the
morning after the Temple disruption,
the tree is already dead.

N.T.
Wright explains, “But Mark makes it clear, by the placing of the
Temple incident within the two halves of the fig tree story, that he
sees Jesus’ actions as, again, a dramatic acted parable of
judgment. This was Jesus’ way of announcing God’s condemnation of
the Temple
itself and all that it had become in the national life of Israel.”
Jesus judges the tree and it dies. Jesus judges the Temple to kill
its power, in particular its power to dominate.

So,
why did Jesus plan a disruption at the Temple? It was so Jesus could
indict the Temple, knowing that between this action and his Palm
Sunday entrance the day before, it would likely result in his death.
Indeed,
it is within the Temple passage that
the author of
Mark notes for the first time that the chief priests and scribes
decided to kill Jesus and began plotting to this effect. The author
of Mark illustrated Jesus’ plan through the fig tree, but a
contemporaneous audience would also have recognized it through Jesus’
own reported words. “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called
a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den
of robbers.” Marcus Borg helps us to better understand these
references, explaining them as a combination of Isaiah 56:7 (the
Temple as a house of prayer for all nations) and Jeremiah 7:11. The
latter is part of what is called Jeremiah’s “temple sermon,” in
which, according to Borg, Jeremiah “warned that it would be
destroyed unless those who worshipped there began to practice
justice.” Earlier, the text reads

,
“If you truly amend your ways and doings, if you truly act justly
one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan and the
widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go
after gods to your own hurt, then I [God] will dwell with you in this
place.” (Jeremiah 7:5-7)

Borg
goes on,

Then,
still speaking in the name of God, Jeremiah said, ‘Has this house
[the temple], which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in
your sight?’ The phrase in Hebrew suggests not just thievery, but
robbing with violence. In what sense had the temple become ‘a den
of robbers,’ a cave of violent ones? In Jeremiah, the meaning is
apparent: it was a ‘den of robbers’ precisely because it had
become the center of an oppressive system that did not practice
justice, but exploited the most vulnerable in society. It was an
indictment of the powerful and wealthy elites of his day, centered in
the monarchy and temple. Their everyday injustice made them robbers,
and they thought of the temple as their safe house and place of
security.

Thus,
when Jesus called the temple ‘a den of robbers,’ he was not
referring to the activity of the money changers and sellers of
sacrificial animals. Rather, he indicted the temple authorities as
robbers who collaborated with the robbers at the top of the imperial
domination system. They had made the temple into a den of robbing and
violence. Jesus’ action was not a cleansing of the temple, but an
indictment of the temple. The teaching explains the act. Indeed, it
was the reason for the act.”

This
was why Jesus planned a disruption of the temple. This is why it was
worth it to him to accept the consequences of having publically
indicted the Temple and its authority.

We
don’t live in a preindustrial, agricultural domination system
anymore. Obviously. Now we live in a post-industrial,
non-agricultural, domination system. The rules are both different
and the same. The work of the many is still used to enrich the few,
although we have new ways of blaming the many for not being wealthy
themselves. Our domination system is dependent on racism, sexism,
transphobia, heteronormativity, xenophobia, and all kinds of other
ways of dehumanizing God’s beloved people.

The
system falls apart when we look at each other, no matter the
differences, and see another human being, a beloved person of God,
worthwhile and worth listening to. However, it is not just that we
are called to do this individually. Like Jesus, we need to pay
attention to how our institutions (including faith traditions) are
being systematically used as part of the domination system. Then,
like Jesus, we need to disrupt the system. It turns out this Temple
cleansing is NOT, as many of us thought, the one counter-example to
an otherwise calm and loving Jesus. This story is the epitome of
Jesus loving God’s people, it is Jesus loving God’s people enough to
upset the system to give them a chance, even when it would inevitably
lead to his own death.

Today,
we are similarly called to disrupt. It may or may not involve
dramatic
acts
of disruption. However, when we see actions of thievery, of
state-sanctioned robbery, of oppressive political systems
that do not practice justice and
instead
create legal structures for the exploitation of the most vulnerable
in society—we are called to indict the powers that do such things
and to seek ways to disrupt these actions. Look for the ways in which
you can step outside of your normal behaviors in order to dramatize,
shed light on, injustice
and indict the powers behind it. Look for the ways in which you can
step outside of your normal behaviors and activities in order to
advocate for the vulnerable, the marginalized and exploited. Look for
the ways in which you can work collectively and organize in order to
address the systems that marginalize and exploit the vulnerable.
Imagine these actions and others like them. Sit with whatever
discomfort these thoughts may bring. Pray over how you are called to
respond. Then, join with others to do. As Jesus did. Amen.

1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillel_the_Elder
accessed
March 14, 2017.

2Marcus
Borg, “Jesus:
Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious
Revolutionary” (USA:
HarperOne, 2006) page 89-93.

3
Borg, 79-80.

4Borg,
79-80.

5Borg
81-82.

6
Borg, 90.

7N.T.
Wright, Mark
for Everyone,
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), p. 151.

Home Missioner Kevin M. Nelson and Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

Sermons

Welcoming and Loving in Difficult Times

March 13, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305Pronouns: she/her/hershttp://fumcschenectady.org/

By Michele Cole

03/12/17

You know, one of my
favorite holy days is Ash Wednesday, odd as that may sound. I can’t
really explain why that is, except that there’s something very
grounding about being reminded that we are from the earth and to it
we shall return. It’s a reminder that we are a part of the big
cosmic dance that includes all living things as well as inorganic
creations like rocks and sand (particularly beach sand! 
) Or maybe it fulfills some kind of need to take a step back and
really look at how I live in and relate to the world outside myself.
I know these days I love to hear Pastor Sara read the litany from Yom
Kippur when she preaches in the joint ecumenical service; it’s
beautiful and life affirming. The downside to Ash Wednesday, at least
for me, is that it’s the beginning of Lent, which I’ve never
liked very much. As many of you know I grew up Catholic, although in
talking with others I find it was much the same elsewhere during that
time. I was a very imaginative and sensitive child and my very
traditional parish emphasized during Lent what was wrong with me, and
what I needed to do to be worthy. I was taught, or at least I
believed, that I was so bad that Jesus had to die because of me; and
so of course I felt very guilty that I helped to kill God. This isn’t
a judgement on the religion in which I was raised. This is how it
was, and I took it all in.

However, that’s not the
end of the story. As I was reading an online article on the United
Methodist Church’s General Board of Discipleship website a light
bulb went off in my head. I realized that the focus of Lent has
changed since my childhood, and indeed began changing across
denominational Christianity a few decades ago. Rather than a time of
grimness that we just need to suffer through, the theology and
practice of Lent has changed its focus to embrace a quiet time of
reflection and preparation. This shift in perspective brought us back
to the days of the early Christ followers, when they saw Lent as a
time of preparation for the sacrament of Baptism. For them, Lent was
the home stretch, as it were, when converts to Jesus’ Way received
their final faith formation before they entered the sacred covenant
with Christ and Christ’s church. This time was not all inward
focused, however; community members and soon-to-be members were
expected to look outwardly as well, tending to those in need. Lent
culminated in Easter, but also in baptism into a new way of living
for oneself and others.

I also learned that for
this Lenten season, the Methodist Church has decided to focus on
living out our baptismal calling, with a look each week at a
different baptismal question. Now, before you decide this sermon is
going to be as dry as dust, please hear me out! Maybe it will be, but
I’m finding it quite interesting how all of this is coming
together. You see, this week’s question is – “Do you accept the
freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and
oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?” Quite a
well-timed question, as it fits in rather nicely with the Scriptural
passages I chose for today and, unfortunately, with the tenor of
world events that have been happening recently.

Our second reading for
today recalls the sheep and goats parable that is told just before
Matthew’s recounting of Jesus’ passion and resurrection. Given
the timing as the last instruction before the end, it can be thought
of as holding special emphasis as the final word on Jesus’ social
teachings. Let me put a little context around it, as I pulled most of
it out. This comes at the end of Matthew’s chapter 25, where Jesus
has been cautioning His followers about the coming of God’s kingdom
and what their attitudes and activities should be. He has already
told them to be alert, lest God come when they are not prepared, and
also to be bold, not cautious, as they go about spreading the Good
News and growing the number of disciples. Now he is taking those
teachings to a new level; not only are they to be concerned about
their own day to day living, but they are to notice and enhance the
lives of the neediest among them. This is not just a morality tale,
though, of how we are to act … it is also a tale of how we are to
BE in the world and what attributes we are to cultivate in ourselves.
For if you read the rest of the story, you will see that neither the
sheep who were kind to the needy nor the goats who were not, did it
because Jesus was alive in the marginalized. They didn’t realize it
was Him. Those who reached out expressed their compassionate care of
each other, their desire to help another in a time of great need. The
goats had no such compassion and in fact, by saying “we didn’t
realize it was you” betrayed their cynicism; had they known it was
Jesus certainly they would have done something for Him. For their
neighbor, not so much.

So ultimately this is a
love story, a story where we are the lovers, where because we are
loved we can in turn pass it on. It is a story that reminds us in
fairly clear language what we, in our love for each other, are to do.
Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit those in prison, welcome the
stranger – while I imagine that we’ve heard these words many
times before, they are taking on new meaning today, in a world that
seems to get meaner and harder with each news cycle. I admit to being
somewhat of a Facebook junkie, and I spend some time each day reading
story after story about one group pitting themselves against another
more marginalized group, as if there is just a finite amount of love
and kindness in the world and it shouldn’t be spent on ‘them.’
More people are being overtly demonized, with more dire consequences,
than in any time in my memory. It’s easy enough to do, and there
are certain segments of our society now that seem to relish the task.
I was reminded of this when I saw Wicked last weekend, which was
fabulous by the way! 
I don’t know how many of you know the story but in a nutshell, it’s
a story about the ‘wicked’ witch of the west and how she came to
be wicked. And it turns out that it wasn’t her doing at all. She
was not ‘the bad one,’ but rather the victim of ‘othering.’
She was different from birth, with a different color skin from
everyone else, and so she was ostracized. She developed a talent for
doing spells and went to see the Wizard of Oz, who turned out to be
just a man, not really a wizard. She realized that he’d come into
power on a lie, and was in the process of eliminating all diversity
in the land of Oz. She argued with him and refused to join him;
instead she ran away. At which point the ‘Wonderful Wizard of Oz’
began to systematically demonize her, spreading rumors about her
evilness and telling lies about bad things that she had not done. By
the end of it, the people of Oz were thoroughly convinced that she
was bad to the bone, an evil wicked witch, even though her whole
reputation was built on lies. She was trying to do good, but the
castle was twisting everything she did, until finally she was no more
…

Which brings me back to
the present time, and the demonization of the ‘other,’ whether he
is an immigrant, or she is a refugee child fleeing from destruction
in her homeland, or they are a family of Muslims who are seeking
safety from an extremist organization that wants them dead. How are
we to think about the rhetoric that is flowing over us like so many
words, telling stories about the people who are leaving all they know
to come to where they hope is a safe place, guided only by their
hopes and the love of God who wants all God’s children to be safe.
Let’s take a moment to look at the lessons in the first reading,
when God called Abram and Sarai out of the land of their birth to
venture into a new land where their descendants will number like
stars in the sky.

Abram and Sarai were the
ultimate strangers; at a time when there were no Motel 6s or Google
Earth maps, they trusted God and went where they were told. They were
promised that they would be safe, that they would be led to a new
land, and that they would be a blessing to the world. This story
doesn’t say how they were treated along the way, whether they were
hassled or confronted, or whether they encountered the hospitality
that is so critical to so many stories in the Old Testament. What we
do know, though, is that they made it through to each place they were
led. They brought their customs and beliefs to a foreign land and
worshiped their God, and apparently were left alone to do this in
peace. And of course from them was born the Jewish people. This isn’t
just a creation story, though, detailing how the people of Israel
began. It is also a metaphor for how we are supposed to live, and to
think about others who are strangers in our lands. As Timothy F.
Simpson has pointed out in the online forum Political
Theology Today, this story is intended both
to make us think that we should be them (that is, that we should be
following where God leads, and trusting in God’s promises), but
also that we could be them. That like Sarai and Abram if we follow
where God leads we could be traveling to places we’ve never been
before, meeting people unlike us and bringing blessings to whoever is
there before us. This heightened sensitivity, or empathy, for the
stranger takes us in a couple of directions. It can lead us to put
ourselves in their place, encouraging us to treat them as we would
wish to be treated if we were far from home and family. We are also
led to recognize the blessings brought into our communities by those
whose talents and perspectives are different from our own. We are
called to be inclusive, to recognize the humanity of the stranger, to
be welcoming …

Welcoming … it can be
very hard for us to do, especially when those we greet look or act
differently from us, or from how we think they should. Heightened
tensions in the United States and around the world are resulting in
policies targeting Muslims and brown skinned people, murders of
people with brown skins or turbans, anti-Semitism resulting in bomb
threats and cemetery desecrations, and more murders of trans women of
color. In the absence of facts, ‘alternative truth’ is leading
Americans to fear and hate immigrants, refugees and anyone outside of
our comfort zone. Yet all is not yet lost, even though sometimes I’m
not sure I recognize our country anymore. Amid yells of “go back to
where you came from” we have to be the people of welcome, of
abundant love. We have to recognize the humanity of those who others
demonize, and share our humanity with them. We must model for the
world what we would like the world to become, and represent not only
the wanderer but also the One to whom we belong. If that sounds vague
I’m afraid it is, because each of us has a different talent to
share, and more or less time to exercise it. Each of us has a
different perspective on current events, and how we would like to
influence them. What I’m really suggesting is that we need to be
awake to what is going on around us at all levels of our society, and
to be ready to respond in whatever way makes the most sense for each
of us. As we seek to reach out to the least of these, and welcome the
strangers among us, we often need to look no farther than next to us,
or down the street, or sometimes even no farther than our own mirror.

In
the Matthew passage, the point is made that Christ has aligned
himself with the ‘least of these’ and in so doing, is found in
all of us. I would argue that when we think about bringing compassion
and love to each other, we should also pay attention to how we can
care for ourselves. It can be hard to do, I know, because I’m
working on it myself. It can be very easy to look after everyone else
but ignore our own very real needs for love, connection, compassion.
Right now I’m very concerned about how many people are hurting,
both the targets of nastiness and those of us who care about them and
for them. The 24 hour news cycle is producing lots of anger, despair
and hopelessness as it seems we go from one painful episode to
another. Many of us are simply exhausted and are struggling to make
sense of what’s happening around us. It’s in times like this that
we are called to nurture ourselves, to bring that same abundance of
compassion and love to ourselves that we give to each other. It’s
ok to recognize that our energy isn’t limitless and our passion
needs feeding before we can feed another.

This brings me to another
challenge that I’m struggling with; I don’t have an answer for
it, I just want to put it out here for your consideration. I’ve
talked a lot today about loving the least of these, and reaching out
to our neighbors, especially those who are being oppressed and
marginalized by society. But, that leaves out a group of people whom
we may not want to consider but who I feel we must. What about those
folks who are doing, saying and believing things that we find
absolutely abhorrent? Those whose attitudes we believe to be
completely wrong and even contrary to the Good News that we listen to
and love? I don’t know if you remember, but Sara preached about the
question I raised at the Connection gathering a few weeks ago,
wondering how peace and anger can co-exist, how we can be peaceful
without losing the edge that draws us into social action. I am now
raising a similar question, but one that may make us a little more
uncomfortable. At least it makes me squirm. I’m trying to figure
out how to love someone who I would much rather hate, or at least
detest a lot. Who I may actually think is dangerous to me or to our
society. I don’t mean that squishy kind of love that Kay Jewelers
sings about, but instead the robust love that we are told to bestow
on each other just for being a child of God in whom Jesus lives. What
does that love look like when its object is someone we don’t like?
How do we manifest it in our lives, and how do we come to terms with
it ourselves? I also wonder if, by saying that there are people who
by their words or actions don’t merit my love and concern, am I not
being just like those very people who hate others and wish ill for
them? Does the guilt or innocence of the person impact my Christian
love for them? Just a few of the questions swirling around in my
head. I’d welcome a conversation about them sometime if anyone
wants to take that one on!

Our readings for this
morning provide guidance as we consider the baptismal question I
posed earlier … “Do you accept the freedom and power God gives
you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they
present themselves?” If we are to answer yes to this question, we
must follow the direction we receive from God to welcome the stranger
among us. To feed, clothe, visit and care for the least among us
with an abundant compassion and love that reaches out because our
neighbor is in need, recognizing that Christ lives in everyone we
touch. To care for ourselves because we see the Christ in ourselves,
and to provide us with the strength and determination to keep
reaching out where we are needed. And finally to love without measure
not only those who are loveable, or those who we ‘should’ love
but also those who think differently from us or who have different
values. Because to resist evil and injustice do we not need to
counter it with love as well as with action? As Martin Luther King
Jr. said in his 1963 book of sermons Strength
to Love, “Returning hate for hate
multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of
stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies
hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies
toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. So when Jesus says
“Love your enemies,” he is setting forth a profound and
ultimately inescapable admonition. Have we not come to such an
impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies– or else?
The chain reaction of evil–hate begetting hate, wars producing
wars–must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of
annihilation.” These were timely words in 1963 when Martin
Luther King Jr put them to paper. They are equally of timely today.
May we find it in ourselves to love our enemies, even as we struggle
for a world where all are treated fairly and welcomed without
hesitation.

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

Sermons

“Taking Her Seat” based on Isaiah 58:1-12 and Luke…

March 5, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

In
all the times I’ve studied – and preached on – this little story
from Luke, I’ve never paid attention to where it falls in the Gospel.
I suspect I’ve been too busy trying to justify Martha or emulate
Mary to attend to such a basic factor. It turns out that the story
of Mary and Martha comes RIGHT AFTER the Parable of the Good
Samaritan. That’s a pretty significant location. The Parable of the
Good Samaritan is especially potent and it seems very likely that the
brilliant writer Luke would use the story that follows it to
strengthen and emphasize it, right?

Right.
They are meant to work together!

As
the Jesus Seminar puts it, “Both the Samaritan and Mary step out of
conventional roles in Luke’s examples. This is Luke’s reason for
placing the story of Mary and Martha in tandem with the parable of
the Samaritan. The Samaritan for Luke illustrates the second
commandment (“Love your neighbor as yourself”), Mary exemplifies
the fulfillment of the first commandment (“You are to love the Lord
your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your
energy, and with all your mind”).”¹
Other commentators point out that where the Samaritan “sees” in
the way Jesus wants his followers to see, Mary “hears” as a model
for how his followers should listen for God and hear Jesus. The two
characters complement and complete each other.

Alan
Culpepper in the New Interpreter’s Bible explains the two stories
together in this way:

“In
it’s own way, the conjunction of the stories about the good Samaritan
and the female disciple voice Jesus’ protest against the rules and
boundaries set by the culture in which he lived. As they develop
seeing and hearing as metaphors for the activity of the kingdom, the
twin stories also expose the injustice of social barriers that
categorize, restrict, and oppress various groups in any society
(Samaritan, victims, woman). To love God with all one’s heart and
one’s neighbor as oneself meant then and now that one must often
reject society’s rules in favor of the codes of the kingdom – a
society without distinctions and boundaries between its members. The
rules of this society are just two – to love God and one’s neighbor
– but these rules are so radically different from those of the
society in which we live that living by them invariably calls us to
disregard all else, break the rules, and follow Jesus’ example.”²
(NIB, 232)

It
seems this story may pack quite a punch! So, while remembering to
keep the Good Samaritan story close, let’s look at this text again.
Both stories are set in the beginning of Luke’s story of Jesus
traveling to Jerusalem, a journey that will be concluded on Palm
Sunday. This is part of a journey narrative.

For
some here today this is a new story, and for others it is very
familiar. Often, I hear people talk about which sister they identify
with, this is one of the stories people use to make sense of their
own lives! It is sometimes tempting to make the story overly
symbolic, but there are reasons to refrain from that temptation.
John Fitzmyer in the Anchor Bible Series says, “To
read this episode as a commendation of contemplative life over
against active life is to allegorize it beyond recognition and to
introduce a distinction that was born only of later preoccupation.
The episode is addressed to the Christian who is expected to be
contemplativus(a)
in actione.”³

The challenge of keeping this
story in perspective is that we are easily drawn into
particularities. Jesus likely traveled WITH a large group of
followers and Martha was thus expected to prepare a large meal for
all of them, in this case without help. We want to wonder if she was
trying to be too elaborate, or if Jesus was simply taking the side of
Mary because Martha triangulated, or if Mary was usually “lazy.”
It is easy to find ourselves in this story, but that makes it harder
to hear this story. This is a story that KNOWS that faithfulness to
God requires learning AND action. This is a story about Jesus, who
called people to change their whole lives. It isn’t about who is
stuck doing the dishes, even though we know that story well. And for
today at least (we’ll get to Martha in the future), it isn’t about
Martha at all! Today is all about Mary 😉

Mary appears deceptively passive
in this story. She doesn’t speak, she’s simply spoken about. In
fact, all we really know is that she sat and listened. Well, that
and her sister didn’t appreciate it. Is sitting and listening really
so radical?

Yes.

It is radical because sitting at the feet of a teacher, a rabbi, was
the position of a disciple.
And in that time, women were not usually allowed to be disciples.
As the IVP Women’s Bible explains, “In
the first century women usually had no part in organized education.
Few were literate. Their education was confined to domestic and
family matters. Thus the considerable evidence that women were
followers of Jesus and played a significant part in the disciple band
is in contrast to the accepted practices of the day.”⁴

Mary’s
action isn’t just reflective of her radical choice because it wasn’t
one that she could take on her own. Her action reflects the radical
inclusion of Jesus. Back to the IVP Women’s Bible, “Jesus welcomed
many different women as learners (Mary of Bethany, Luke 10:39, 42)
and encouraged them to engage with him in his theological
conversations (Martha, Jn 11:21-27; Canaanite woman, Mt 15:24-28;
Samaritan woman, Jn 4:7-26). This was in contrast to the rabbinic
practice of excluding women.”⁵
Throughout Luke, Jesus offered instruction in synagogues, homes, and
in personal conversations to WOMEN.⁶
Jesus was a radical teacher willing to accept many kinds of
students, and a radical student willing to claim her spot no matter
what others thought of her!

I’m
told that Jesus taking on abnormal disciples extended well beyond
Mary and the teaching of women. Most rabbi’s took on only the
brightest and best pupils and nurtured them from their childhoods to
be excellent scholars. Jesus took on adult men who had been making
livings as fisherman, thus clearly not the perfect pupils another
rabbi had snapped up. Jesus refused hierarchies – EVEN the ones
that might have been seen as reasonable and helpful!!

The
writers in the Women’s Bible also pointed out that Luke’s account of
Mary and Martha seems to reflect a slightly later Christian
tradition. By the time of Acts, it was common for evangelists to
travel around preaching and teaching in the name of Jesus. They were
often hosted by women, who were then responsible for two tasks:
hospitality AND discernment. Clearly if a wealthy woman was going to
use her resources to support a traveling preacher, she needed to be
able to tell if the preacher was worth learning from! The radical
inclusion of women extended into the early church. The Women’s Bible
explains it this way,

“In
accounts of the early church we are made especially aware of the
women who revived traveling evangelists into their homes (Acts 16:15;
40; 18:2-3). More often than those of men, we are told the names
women in those houses the early churches met (Acts 12:12; 16:13-15;
40; Rom 16:3-5; 1 Cor 16:19; Col 4:15). Theirs was the
responsibility not only to provide food and housing of the itinerate
missionary but also to assess the message that was brought (see2
John; 3 John). This required that the women must be carefully taught
and possess a strong understanding of the fundamentals of the gospel.
… The story before us presents a paradigm of the attitude and
activities of women who opened their homes for gospel ministry.”⁷

Thus,
in this story, Mary IS doing half of the work – she is learning and
listening so that she will be able to discern who is worth listening
to in the future!!

I
really appreciate this idea that the women who offered hospitality
also had to be careful about whose perspective they empowered. I
like the reminder that hospitality, and extending one’s home, is a
powerful and important action that these women played a curating
role in who got to talk!!! I also think it is helpful to think
of Mary as listening, learning, and sitting AT THIS MOMENT in time so
that she would be of GREATER USE later. This is often how I think of
YOU. FUMC Schenectady’s identity statement is, “We
are a church that loves to learn and yearns to be a gift from God to
our communities.” These are two connected statements. This church
loves to learn because this church loves being useful in building the
kin-dom and in being a gift from God to our communities. This is a
church who cares enough to do things WELL, and that often means
slowing down and listening before acting.

For
Mary, like for us, listening precedes service so that service can be
done well. And that’s imperative. Simply following our instincts
often means doing more harm than good. Those who created “Indian
Missionary Schools” and those who taught in them meant to do GOOD,
but they did harm that has been passed down through generations!!
They didn’t listen to those they were trying to help. In the past
few years I’ve been part of a group trying to rethink the global
structure of the United Methodist Church to eliminate colonialism and
become true partners around the world. A few weeks ago I got to talk
to members of the UMC from Africa and in one succinct sentence they
proved to me that the plan was fundamentally flawed. We didn’t
listen to the people we were trying to include!

Listening
and learning is an imperative first step to any acts of service.
Transforming the world, or loving our neighbors with the love they
really need, or responding to the needs of people around us, or even
finding the ways to be whole and peace-filled people whose presence
is a gift of grace requires listening and learning first – to God,
to ourselves, AND to others. The Hebrew Bible lesson today suggests
that the people of God were not listening to what God needed nor to
what people living in poverty in their midst needed. Listening
and learning are of equal value and importance to action and service.
Together Mary and her sister show us what it can look like, just as
together Mary and the Good Samaritian show us what it is like to see
and hear.

Mary
listened. Mary learned. It was radical and subversive of her to sit
at Jesus’ feet as a disciple, and it was radical and subversive of
Jesus to teach women alongside men. Yet Jesus defends Mary’s right
to listen and learn, claiming that it is a good way to be in the
world. As important as action and service are, rushed action that
comes before listening and learning is often more harm than good.
May we leave this place open to the experiences of listening, and may
we sit down to learn from those are good and worthy teachers. May we
listen, like Mary. Because she sat, let us learn to sit and listen.
Amen

1 Robert W. Funk, Roy W Hoover,
and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the
Authentic Words of Jesus (HarperOneUSA, 1993), 325.

2 R.
Alan Culpepper, “Luke” in The New Interpreter’s Bible Vol. IX
(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), 232.

3
Joesph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke X-XXIV,
(Doubleday and Co.: NY, NY, 1985) p. 892-3.

4 Catherine
Clark Kroeger and Mary J. Evans, editors, The IVP Women’s Bible
Commentary (InverVarsity
Press: Downers Grove, Illinois, 2002), p 571.

5 Ibid

6 The
Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version Bible
Translation,
edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011),124.

7 IVP
Women’s Bible Commentary, 574.

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 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

“Nevertheless Delilah Persisted” based on Judges 16:4-20

February 19, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I’m told that back in the day, and the day wasn’t so
long ago, the town of Hanover NH had a coffee shop called “The
Perfect Woman.” The sign for the shop featured a woman’s
silhouette, without a head, implying that the perfect woman was a
body existing for male pleasure without a voice with which to express
herself. The coffee shop had been named during a time when Dartmouth
had only male students and that reality created a hyper masculine
worldview around those parts. The store name and sign reflected the
values that attracted customers at that time.

Sometimes the Bible has a hyper masculine worldview too,
and one of the most blatant expressions of hyper masculinity is found
in the narrative of Sampson. Sampson’s story is complex, it has
clearly been retold over the years so that Sampson is at the same
time supposed to be one particular man, all the judges in the Hebrew
people’s history, AND the nation Israel itself. There are layers
upon layers of meaning, and most of them express distrust of the
power of women.

In order to start to make sense of any of this, I think
I better start by explaining “what is a judge?” You may remember
the story of the people of God being enslaved in Egypt and then led
to freedom by Moses. After they had wandered around the desert for a
few generations and Moses died, Joshua led the people into the
Promised Land.

Once the people got into the Promised Land they didn’t
have a king and they didn’t always have a unified leader. Instead,
for several centuries, there was a pattern of events. Things would
be going pretty well and then one of the neighboring countries or
tribes would want to take over Israel. A leader would emerge
(assumed to be the leader God wanted) and lead the people in a
military victory over the aggressor. The military leader would
continue to have the respect of the people and offer leadership to
the 12 tribes until his or her death at which point the tribes would
go back to functioning on their own. The next time an aggressor
showed up a new leader would emerge. Those leaders – the military
generals who gained power through winning battles and kept the power
for their lifetimes without creating dynasties – those were called
the judges.

So now you know.

Sampson is the last judge, and that has resulted in his
story also being used to reflect on the era of the judges as well.
It may be worth remembering the stories of the Hebrew Bible were
written down after centuries of oral tradition around the time of the
Babylonian exile. Thus they were written down more than 400 years
after King David and even longer after the judges. They were written
down in a time when the people were trying to answer the question
“why did God allow us to be defeated by the Babylonians?” and the
particular ways that the stories got told were formed by trying to
answer that question. In that way, he’s the nation Israel too.

Sampson is presented as supernaturally strong, I mean
Superman strong. I don’t say this to make any sense of it, just to
help you understand the story.

Sampson is a Nazirite. That meant that he was a holy
man set apart from others by his devotion to God. Generally
Nazirites avoided alcohol and anything unclean (like dead bodies) and
didn’t cut their hair. In the beginning of Sampson’s story his
barren mother is told to avoid alcohol even during her pregnancy to
set him up for the work God had for him. I say that GENERALLY
Nazirites did this stuff because Sampson broke every rule other than
the hair one well before this story. However, the ANGEL who came
down to speak to his BARREN mother about her upcoming conception is
meant to get our attention about the greatness of the man who would
be born as well as to remind us of the matriarchs in Genesis –
creating the symbol of Sampson as the nation itself who was born
because those barren women gave birth. The angel who spoke to his
mother told her that “he would begin the deliverance of Israel from
the hands of the Philistines.” (13:5b)

So, Sampson’s mother is the madonna of any madonna-whore
complex, she is faithful, pure, and subservient. Sampson is really
attracted to non-Israelite women. Women are his downfall. First he
laid eyes on a Philistine woman and decided that he had to marry her.
His faithful parents objected, indicating that if he was going to
lead the Hebrew people it would best if he married a Hebrew wife. He
refused to listen, and he married the Philistine woman.

Why do we care, you ask? Well, we may not. But his
parents did because the Philistines were at the time the aggressors
who were trying to take parts of the Israelite land and engaging them
in battle and having the leader of the Israelites marry one of them
just didn’t seem like it would help.

It didn’t. The story is too weird to summarize well but
the Philistine wife ended up manipulating Sampson by indicating that
if he didn’t do what she wanted he didn’t love her. Then she
betrayed him, so he left her. Then, in order to appease his rage the
Philistine’s killed her and her father.

At some point later Sampson saw a woman he liked so he
slept with her, she was a Philistine prostitute, and the Philistines
tried to kill him while he slept afterward, but he got away because
of his supernatural strength.

Then comes this story. This story fits well into what
we already know about Sampson: he is strong, he is rash, he is
fickle, he is susceptible to the charms of women, and his enemies are
looking for a way to take him down. This fits all three versions of
the Sampson story, as does the perception of Delilah as an evil
seductress. The story of Sampson as a man is the story of a man
whose Achilles heel was his attraction to inappropriate women. The
story of Sampson as the judges is the story of leaders whose moral
character was lax, who could be distracted as easily as by a
beautiful woman. The story of Sampson as Israel itself during the
Exile is the story of a nation of men who choose foreign women and
were ruined by the way those women led them to unfaithfulness to God.

Delilah is the symbol of temptation and seduction as
well as greed. Her name means, “flirtatious”¹
while the name of her town means “choice vine.”²
It is intentional symbolism. She represents all of humanities fear
of the power of sexual attraction and the way it make us lose our
head. More specifically she represents the mystery of womanhood and
the fear that some men have about women and their different ways of
being. Delilah could easily step in as the negative female character
in just about any simplistic movie or book. She’s the one the hero
is attracted to, she’s the one who brings him down, she’s the
original femme fatale.

That is, unless you look at the story from her
perspective. Sampson had taken a walk one day, seen a
woman, and married her. That woman had no say in it. His wife had
attempted to do right by her people, and had gotten killed for it –
along with her father. Delilah, similarly, did not have any say in
entering a relationship with Sampson. The text says “he fell in
love with” her. It does not say, nor imply that the love was
reciprocated. It does not suggest that they got married. It
certainly seems that they were intimate, but he was so important that
he got what he wanted and normal limits didn’t apply.

Delilah would have known all this. She knew that it was
dangerous to have Sampson in love with her, that it could end as soon
as it began, and that no one was going to help her if that happened.
We have no way of knowing if he was kind to her, but we also have no
reason to assume he was. He isn’t presented as a man with a lot of
empathetic or listening skills. Most of what is said about him
suggests he may have been abusive.

We also don’t know Delilah’s ethnicity. She is said to
come from a town that is on the border, just inside Israel. If she
was from there she may be an Israelite nor she may be a Canaanite.
But since the Philistines come to her, and since every other woman
Sampson is said to have been attracted to is Philistine, I think it
is likely that she was a Philistine. Now, we can’t KNOW this, but
2/3 three choices mean that Sampson was not the leader of her people,
and I’m willing to take that seriously. While the way the text is
usually read blames Delilah for selling out her man/leader for money,
it may well be that she was trying to save her people as well as her
own skin. If she was a Philistine then what she did was patriotic!
She saved her people. If she was a Canaanite, there was no reason
why she should have been loyal to the Israelite leader who had taken
over their land. And if she was an Israelite (which I think makes
the least sense in the story) she at least had incentive to try to
end his life before hers got abruptly ended for her like his first
wife.

Delilah decided to seek the information she needed. We
don’t know if the money induced her or simply gave her courage, but
she tried. She tried a bunch of times and he seems to be playing
with her. He certainly seems to know what she’s up to, which is why
it makes no sense that he answers her.
However, she plays the one card she has. This is the key to this
story. It is verse 15, “Then
she said to him, ‘How can you say, “I love you”, when your
heart is not with me? You have mocked me three times now and have not
told me what makes your strength so great.’ “ She throws
his claim of love back in his face, claiming that if he won’t tell
her his secret than he doesn’t really love her. This was EXACTLY the
way his first wife got a secret out of him. Apparently he found this
argument particularly convincing.

He
told her. She did it. It worked. He was captured, humiliated, and
enslaved. SHE lived. If her people were the Philistines or the
Canaanites, then her people were better off as well. She used her
power, which in this case was something she didn’t even want to begin
with. The power she had was that this man said he loved her (or
maybe did love her) and she manipulated that to survive.

The
thing is that we often don’t have the upper hand in life. Sometimes
it is like this: being a woman walking down the street in the village
and then suddenly, by force, being the mistress of the strong-man
leader everyone fears. Sometimes we have that little power. But we
always have SOME power. Delilah had a little tiny bit of power and
used it. We have choices we can make and we have the capacity to use
our words, our actions, our relationships, our trust, and our energy
to whatever end we find worthwhile. Sometimes, like Delilah, that’s
in survival. When we’re lucky, and we’re surviving already, we can
use it to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms
the present themselves (#baptismalvows) Sometimes we get to resists
evil, injustice or oppression – big or small.

The
power we have, as small and insignificant as it may seem, can take
down the strongest human or the most feared enemy. Like Delilah
though, it takes persistence. A little power goes a lot further when
it is used persistently, and even FURTHER when it is used with
other’s little bits of power – persistently. Come to think of it,
especially this far into the Subversive Women sermon Series, maybe
there is something to being afraid of women. However, it isn’t our
mystery nor our seduction. It is that we, too, are humans who want
to survive and take care of those we love. And if you get in our
way, we will persistently defy you and subvert you. Thanks be to God
for people of all genders using their power for good. Amen

Sermon
Talk Back

To
get into the mindset of the story, who are other “femme fatale”
characters, and can any of their stories be inverted by taking their
perspective seriously?
What
does conventional masculinity find frightening about femininity?
How
could Sampson be so easily manipulated?
What
stories can you think of when people with VERY little power used it
to overthrow oppression?
Where
is God in this story?
Does
the enmity between ancient Israel and the Philistines serve to teach
us anything today?
How
can we have that much courage and persistence without having our own
backs against the wall, fighting for our lives?

And
how can we do that while also living whole and balanced lives while
we’re at it?

Where
else might we have taken this story?

1Dennis
T. Olsen “The Book of Judges” in the New Interpreter’s Study
Bible Vol II (Abingdon Press: Nashville, 1998) p. 858

2Herbert
Wolf, “Judges” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary Vol 3
(Zondervan: Grand Rapids, MI, 1992), p. 475

Sermons

“A good man and an earnest question” based on…

February 12, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I
don’t know about you, but I have always been haunted by this
scripture passage. It’s on the short list of texts where I hope
Jesus didn’t mean exactly what he said, but I’m never quite sure.
I do know that the story of the Rich Young Ruler is impossible to
dismiss: It appears in all three synoptic Gospels and it ranks among
the most famous of biblical stories.

The
words “rich young ruler” don’t actually appear in the text. I
don’t know when this story acquired that name, but it does us a
disservice in some ways. We hear “rich young ruler” and we think,
“that’s not me.” We might think, “I’m not rich,” or “I’m
not that rich.” Many of us think, “I’m not young” (I know my
knees think I’m not young and that I should act my age and stop
climbing mountains already). And probably none of us here identify as
a “ruler” – though if you changed that to “manager” a few
of us, myself included, would identify with it.

But
those words, rich young ruler, aren’t in the text, and if we put
that familiar label aside and listen to the man’s story, and
imagine who he might be in our own time, he starts to sound a lot
more like many of us.

Allow
me to update the story for you.

Imagine
the scene: The teacher is leaving. His lecture is done, the Q&A
is over, he’s in the parking lot packing up his car, getting ready
to head home. And a man comes running up to him, out of breath. He
has a burning question on his mind and he didn’t get called on
during the discussion but he just knows he must catch the teacher
before he leaves town.

He
kneels down – he’s a huge fan, he has tremendous respect for the
teacher, he’s read all of his books – and he asks: “Good
teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

He’s
a good man, and it’s an earnest question.

Now,
we need to step back for a moment from our 21^st-century
parking lot to 1^st-century
Palestine to understand the words in this question. When we hear the
words “eternal life” many of us think of an afterlife, going to
heaven after we die, something separate from this life. But that is
not at all what it meant in Jesus’s time. Rather than being a
temporal idea, something about some future time, eternal life as
Jesus spoke about it was about a quality
of life – about knowing God, a life lived connected to God, a
richer life of purpose. It isn’t separate from this life.

The
phrase “eternal life” is used interchangeably with “kingdom of
God” and “kingdom of heaven” throughout the synoptic Gospels.
It is about living into, establishing the kingdom – the reign –
the dominion – of God and doing it now.
In
that way, it is about living into and working for God’s vision for
the world. This is most explicit in the Lord’s prayer: “Thy
kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

So
the man’s question, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
is a question about what it takes to be part of the kingdom, what it
takes to do the work of the kingdom, to have that richer, purposeful
life, to work for God’s vision in the world.

He’s
a good man, and it’s an earnest question.

And
Jesus says to him, “you know the commandments: ‘you shall not
murder.’”

And
the man thinks, “OK, I’ve got that one. Check.”

“You
shall not commit adultery.”

“Well,
I’m no Donald Trump. So, check.”
“You
shall not steal.”

“There
was that time I really wanted to steal my little brother’s baseball
mitt.
But I didn’t. Check.”

“You
shall not bear false witness.”

“Not
always easy, but at the end of the day it’s just not right
denigrate anyone else’s reputation, no matter what you think of
them. Yeah, check.”

“You
shall not defraud.”

“I’ve
always been an honest businessman. Main Street, not Wall Street. I’ve paid my employees fairly, never cheated my customers or sold those
cheaper widgets that break too quickly. Check.”

“Honor
your father and mother.”

“Always.
When Dad got sick, I was in the hospital every day, and when he
passed away, we had Mom move in with us, even though we didn’t have
a lot of extra room. Yes, check.”

And
then he thinks, “phew!” and says to Jesus, “I have kept all
these since my youth.”

It’s
not a cocky response. He’s not saying, “Hey, look how great I
am.” After all, the very fact that he’s there in the parking lot
with that question, “what must I do…” indicates that he has
doubts that he’s doing enough.

But
he’s good man. He’s lived an upright life; he’s done right by
his family, his neighbors, friends, his employees, his customers. He
coaches Little League, he organizes the annual charity dinner for the
local hospital, he goes to church every Sunday.

He’s
serious about his faith. That’s why he’s there with that
question. It’s an earnest question.

And
Jesus sees all of that. Mark says “Jesus, looking at him, loved
him.” Jesus doesn’t discount any of what the man has done when he
says this next thing to him:

“You
lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor
and you will have treasure in heaven; then, come, follow me.”

It’s
not that what the man has done is bad, it’s just that Jesus is
saying there’s more. If you truly want to experience eternal life,
if you want to be part of the kingdom, to build the kingdom, to do
God’s work in the world, there is more; and this is what it is.

Our
good man is shocked. He’s devastated. And he goes away, the story
says, “grieving, for he had many possessions.”

Can
you imagine?

Give
up everything?
I could increase my pledge, he thinks, maybe even tithe. But
everything?
And if I give everything away, how will I live? What about my family?

And
what does it mean, “follow me?” I thought that’s what I was
doing.
This
story is about many things, including the undisputable bias against
economic wealth that runs throughout the Bible.

But
it’s about other things, too.

Now
I don’t know if we are all supposed to literally sell everything.

I
do know how the Rich Young Ruler feels when he hears that, though.
Because I have many possessions, too, and as much as I want to follow
Jesus, I know right now I am not giving away everything I own. I
can’t bring myself to do it. Or at least not yet, I won’t say
never.

But
I want to sidestep the question this morning of how literally to take
this directive and focus instead on another dimension of the message
in the story.
This
scripture is about reflection and self-assessment, and then about
encountering judgment from a higher power that leads to deeper
reflection and self-assessment.

The
man asks how he’s doing spiritually. He takes stock as he reviews
how he’s lived up to the commandments Jesus lists. And then he is
issued a deeper challenge; and through that he comes to recognize how
much more he has than he realized, how much more he could give, and
how very hard it would be to do it.

At
its heart, this is a story about recognizing privilege in our lives.

And
in this Trumpian moment, when the oppressors pretend that they are
the oppressed, when the vulnerable are scapegoated, I cannot think of
a more relevant lesson for our times.

I
want to suggest to you that the most useful way to understand and
apply this story in our lives today is not to focus only on literal
economic wealth, but to think about currencies of power and privilege
throughout our lives – whether that be economic privilege we have
because of our income or family background, institutional power or
status that we have through a position we hold at work or in the
community, or social privilege that we have because of our race or
sex, religion or immigration status, our ethnicity or sexuality.
What
Jesus is calling us to do in this story is to look deeper at
everything we have, at how exactly we fit into the many social
structures we each are a part of, to recognize where we have
privilege and power in our lives—and to understand that following
him means putting all of it into play.

Being
a part of the kingdom of God, doing the work of the kingdom means
holding nothing back. If it is God’s intent and desire that no one
be excluded; that no one is inside or outside or better than or worse
than; that the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed of this world
are to be welcomed and defended, then we cannot be a part of that if
we insist on holding onto our own privilege and power. We must be
willing to risk our privilege if we are serious about seeking eternal
life and working in the service of God’s vision for the world.

To
say that this is difficult is an understatement. And the Rich Young
Ruler, our good man, has plenty of company among those who are
unwilling or unable to give up what they have, to use their privilege
or risk their privilege, in the service of God’s kingdom.

The
white person who remains silent when her neighbors are talking about
“those illegals” at the block party, and how glad they are that
we’re going to build that wall – even though she knows her
silence means they will think she agrees.

The
up-and-coming manager who crosses the picket line because the CEO
sent a memo saying all non-union workers were to report to duty as
normal – even though he knows that crossing that line means the
strike will be broken and the workers won’t get the healthcare
their families so desperately need.
The
senators who say they are opposed to Trump’s bigotry, his nominees,
his unconstitutional executive orders, but enable business as usual
to proceed – even though that business puts in harm’s way
millions of undocumented immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQI people, and
people covered by the Affordable Care Act.

Clergy
people, and especially bishops and other high-ranking clergy people,
who do not use their status as moral authority figures to denounce
the rising tide of white nationalism because they are afraid of
backlash from some in their congregations or from other church
officials. Silence, as the gay community reminded the world during
the early AIDS crisis, IS complicity.

Jesus
is speaking to all of these people, and to all of us, in this story.
Speaking up, using your privilege, disrupting the harm, risking your
security to protect the vulnerable – that is the work of the
kingdom.

In
Luke’s story, after the man goes away grieving, Jesus piles on with
one of the Bible’s most famous one-liners: “It is easier for a
camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich
to enter the kingdom of God.” As if we weren’t already feeling
like what Jesus is asking is impossible. Indeed, the disciples had
the same reaction. “Then who can be saved?” they ask one another.

If
the story ended here, it would be a bitter tale about our inability
to give up power and privilege for the pursuit of justice. And most
of human history confirms this dark narrative.

But
it’s not
the end of the story.

Jesus
says to his disciples, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for
God; for God all things are possible.”

Do
you believe that? Do you believe that God can inspire mortals to
great acts of daring and personal sacrifice for human freedom?

I
do.

Because
that dark narrative of history is interrupted time and again, in big
ways and small, by another narrative, one about the irrepressible
struggle for truth, for justice, for freedom.

Martin
Luther: “Here I stand. I can do no other.” All things are
possible for God.

Harriet
Tubman: She risked her own life over and over to free others from
slavery. All things are possible for God.

The
Freedom Riders: Black and white women and men together defying
segregation laws in the face of violence, jail, and constant danger.
Yes, all things are possible for God.

The
U.S. Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s is, to me, the finest
chapter of our nation’s history precisely because it is such
eloquent testimony to how God moves in the world inspiring people to
majestic heights of courage and sacrifice and love.

God
is there, too, making all things possible, with every conscientious
objector, with every whistleblower who risks her job to expose unsafe
work conditions or government crimes.

And
God is here, now, in the incredible stand indigenous people have
taken to protect native lands and water against the Dakota Access
Pipeline, in which they have faced down attack dogs, concussion
grenades, water cannons in sub-freezing weather, and arrests, among
other things, and yet remain standing at Standing Rock, in prayer and
witness for the earth itself.

God
is here in the thousands of federal employees who have gone rogue,
risking their jobs by copying data to make sure it’s not destroyed,
filing dissent memos, leaking information to the media and sharing
information directly with the public.

God
is here in the resistance to the Muslim ban and the deportation
orders, in the activists who laid their bodies down in front of an
ICE van last week to prevent the deportation of Guadalupe García and
in the rabbis who were arrested blockading a Manhattan street in
defense of their Muslim sisters and brothers and siblings. In the
thousands upon thousands of protesters who have taken to the streets
every day of the Trump presidency, shoulder to shoulder with people
they had heretofore avoided, chanting “no prisons, no pipelines, no
ban, no wall.”

Yes,
all things are possible for God.

The
question for all of us is, What
things will we let God make possible in our lives? Where
are the places we are called to recognize and risk the power and
privilege we have to do the work of God’s kingdom?

The
answers to these questions are as unique as each of us and our
relationship with God. But if we want to inherit eternal life and do
the work of God’s kingdom, we cannot stay silent and safe on the
sidelines while civil rights are rolled back, Muslims are
scapegoated, immigrants are deported, queer and trans people are
bullied, and dissidents are silenced. We cannot.

What
will you risk? How can you use your privilege? If you’re a U.S.
citizen, will you risk arrest when others cannot? If you’re white,
will you be part of a buffer zone at demonstrations between police
and people of color in order to minimize the danger of police
violence against black and brown bodies? If you’re a Christian,
will you speak up every time you hear an islamophobic remark, whether
it’s your brother-in-law or your boss who makes it?

Imagine
you are at a protest like the one outside the ICE office where
Guadalupe García was held last week. She came to this country when
she was 14, 21 years ago. She’s married and has two kids, 14 and
16, and has worked hard her whole life. Imagine someone like
Guadalupe is about to be deported. She is in the van. Then comes word
that there is a safe house that will offer her sanctuary, they just
need 20 minutes to get someone there to pick her up. The van is about
to leave.

Would
you lay down in front of that van? Would you tie yourself to the
tires? Would you slash those tires, to buy that 20 minutes?

“Go,
sell what you own, and give the money to the poor and you will have
treasure in heaven; then, come, follow me.”

“For
God all things are possible.”

Amen.
February 12, 2017

Sermons

“Subversive Grace” based on Job 2:7-10

February 5, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

This
week a clergy friend reached out with a concern about our United
Methodist Bookstore and recourse center, Cokesbury. In the most
recent Cokesbury catalog, on page 21, listed under “Women’s
Studies” was a book entitled “Zip It” with a cover image of
women’s lips zipped closed. He asked us to join him in expressing
displeasure. I did. I got a response from Cokesbury that attempted
to reassure me by informing me that I was ignorant of their intent.
The email informed me that the author, “offers
practical how-to’s meant to inspire her readers to use their words
‘to build, not to break; to bless, not to badger; to encourage, not
to embitter; to praise, not to pounce’. Her work is very
specific to women’s group Bible study and personal devotion and
reflection.”¹
Clearly the author of the book along with the author of the email
perceive this to be EMPOWERMENT of women. You might stake a guess
that I disagree. You’d be right.

Now,
this particular exchange was fairly trivial this week. It was almost
nothing, except that it served as a reminder of the inherent sexism
in The Church and the resiliency of the patriarchy in the
institution. It was just another
piece of frustration and sadness. In the language of Parker Palmer,
it was another expression of the “tragic gap.” He explains it
this way, “Of
all the tensions we must hold in personal and political life, perhaps
the most fundamental and most challenging is standing and acting with
hope in the “tragic gap.” On one side of that gap, we see the
hard realities of the world, realities that can crush our spirits and
defeat our hopes. On the other side of that gap, we see real-world
possibilities, life as we know it could be because we have seen it
that way.”²

Palmer teaches that much of what we struggle with in life is the
reality of the tragic gap and how to be authentic in response to it.

The
tragic gap ALWAYS exists. For the past few weeks though it has felt
like every piece of news, as well as every time I’ve accessed social
media, I’ve been bombarded with reminders of the tragic gap. At
times it has felt like I’ve been drowning in them. My natural
emotional disposition tends toward happiness and playfulness (along
with overthinking 😉 ), but recently I’ve been feeling tired,
overwhelmed, and bogged down.

Now,
it feels imperative to mention that I do not think that a publishing
foible by Cokesbury is a tragedy, it did not send me into a
depression, and it is not even OVERLY significant. In the face of
the scope of issues today, it barely registers. I have to say this
because the last time I acknowledged being personally harmed by the
existence sexism in the church at large I was told by Annual
Conference Leadership that I was a hysterical woman and sent to
Emotional Intelligence training. So, now that’s cleared up.

Truth
be told though, there are so very many reminders of the tragic gap
right now that they are piled on top of each other. There are all
the normal ones and all the exceptionally new ones. I think it is
creating a phenomenon similar to grief: when a new grief occurs it
also serves to reawaken all the grief we have experienced before it.
No one attack on the world as it should be is the problem: they all
add on to each other and start to snow ball. For many in my life,
I’m hearing that they are now avalanching. Dear friends (please
note: friends, none of you, I wouldn’t share your struggles from this
pulpit) have told me this week that they are experiencing physical
symptoms of the anxiety they experience given the current depth of
the tragic gap. I’m also hearing people are having trouble sleeping,
as well as turning to junk food and alcohol to make it through the
days.

As
for myself, this week I noticed that EVERYTHING I try to do is an
uphill battle. It all just feels harder, sort of like how it does
when I haven’t taken vacation in entirely too many months. My
yearning has been to sit on the couch, drink tea, pet my cat, and
watch West Wing and anything more than that requires steeling myself
to do what needs to be done.

I
don’t know how all of you are doing. I hope some of you are fine and
dandy, with either sufficient coping mechanisms, sufficient hope, or
sufficient joy to counterbalance the world’s problems. I know some
of you are really struggling, and that those struggles are often a
combination of the world around us and the personal issues that keep
coming. Perhaps some are also in the middle: aware of the struggles
and making it. After last week’s sermon, and the Biblical book from
which we read, many of you may be feeling anxious that I’m about to
make it worse.

I
don’t think I am. Ironically enough, Job feels like a friendly
figure right now, and his story seems to give us reason for hope.
For those of you who aren’t inherently familiar with the story, let
me summarize quickly: Job is presented as a truly good human.
Everyone agrees that he is “blameless and upright,” faithful to
God, and even overly observant. He made sacrifices to God JUST IN
CASE one of his sons accidentally sinned. He was also wealthy in the
form of enormous flocks. He and his wife and had 10 children, 7 sons
and 3 daughters. God is said to be proud of Job’s good heart and
faithfulness.

Suddenly
things changed: all of his wealth was either killed or stolen. At
the same time, all of his children, who had been feasting together,
were killed when a wind knocked down the tent. Job turned to grief
and turned his heart to God in prayer. Then, in our text, his
health deteriorated, with painful sores opening all over his entire
body. He is already sitting on an ash heap and appears to simply,
calmly, pick up a piece of a broken pot to use to scratch himself.
It seems that he is already so heartbroken that the physical symptoms
barely register.

That
seems right. The deepest grief I have seen in my life has been the
grief of parents mourning for their children. In the face of losing
10 children, I don’t think anything else would even register. Job’s
wife is convinced that his death is imminent, and even in the midst
of her shared grief, she manages to register the degree of his pain.

The
meaning of her words is not entirely clear. She says, “Do you
still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die.” The big
question is: does she assume he is dying already and wish to ease his
death by helping him speak words of truth on the way out; OR does she
believe his suffering is too great for anyone to handle and believe
that if he curses God, God will finally let him die? That is, it
isn’t clear if she thinks he is dying anyway which then also makes it
unclear if she thinks cursing God will kill him. Since this is a
book especially designed to argue against the idea that a difficult
life indicates that God is punishing you, I’m going to suggest that
the more likely meaning is the first: she wishes for him speak out
loud of his pain to ease the suffering on his way to death.

Truly,
Job’s wife speaks with outstanding grace, especially for a woman who
is also grieving the loss of all of her children. The capacity to
attend to anyone else’s pain in the midst of that grief is unusual –
humans are built that way. She wants his pain to be eased, both
physically and emotionally. She thinks he is being too stoic, and
should let go of his pride in order to find some relief. In Bible
Study we found ourselves telling stories of the end of people’s
lives, and the grace-filled ways we had known loved ones to ease the
end of the dying person’s life. This woman’s words reminded us of
how difficult it can be to let go of a loved one, and at the same
time how much of a relief it is when someone we love is no longer
suffering.

Job’s
wife encouraged him to do what he could do to be at peace at the end
of his life. He refused her, responding that his faith required him
to deal with the pain as it came. In case you haven’t read Job, it
is interesting to note that for chapters upon chapters after this he
expresses his pain with great intensity. However, the prelude seems
to forget those speeches.

Now,
the grace-filled response of Job’s wife has not been heard as such
throughout history. “Chrysostom asked why the Devil left Job his
wife and answered with the suggestion that he considered her a
scourge by which to plague him more acutely than by any other
means.”³
Yep. And he wasn’t alone, “The ancient tradition, reflected in
Augustine, Chrysostom, Calvin, and many others, that she is an aide
to the satan
underestimates the complexity of her role.”⁴
Most male commentators throughout history have condemned Job’s wife
for her words, seeing her as a part of the problem. I wonder how
much of culture’s assumptions about females fed into that
perspective. It was difficult for those of us who studies this
together to hear anything but gentleness, love, and grace in Job’s
wife’s words. They’re subversive grace, for sure, not at all
reflecting the most common ways of showing love, but they’re grace
nonetheless.

The
book of Job explores human suffering, and asks the big questions
about how human suffering and God’s will are related. God’s answers
to Job’s questions are in chapters 38-40 if you want to read them
yourselves. The book of Job gives us a space to reflect on suffering
itself, and it gives us words to name the suffering. We don’t have
to be in Job’s particularly awful position to be suffering, there are
many kinds of suffering in the world.

This
week we had a Gathering of (The) Connection where we talked about
finding peace. We were gifted with wonderful questions: what is
peace? What helps you find peace? What keeps you from peace? We
discussed the balance of righteousness anger and peace, and we
wondered about it. As we discussed a thought started to form in me:
I think I’ve been doing it wrong. (Or if not “wrong” than in a
less than optimal way.)

In
recent weeks, I have allowed my fears and angers to motivate and lead
me, and I am not at my best when I do that. Certainly there is
plenty worth protesting, there are great organizations to donate to,
and imperative conversations to have. However, if I want to be as
useful as I can be in building the kin-dom of God, then I need to
start those actions from the best motivation. Now I’m wondering if I
can attend to centering myself in the unconditional love of God and
wonder of life and Creation – even now, ESPECIALLY now? Can I
allow myself to slow down enough to consider where my energy belongs
and where my gifts are most useful? Can I show up, wherever I show
up, grace-filled and at peace so that the love I have to share can be
part of what I offer in changing the world? Can I learn how to hold
peace in such a deep way that it allows me to hold anger differently?

Please
be aware that I think grace-filled and at peace can be a reasonable
way to protest, chant, and resist!! I’m talking about the inner
motivation and way of responding to the rest of God’s people. When
it comes down to it, I think that the energy we bring into the world
changes it more than the words we use. The world is desperately in
need of love and peace – and listening as well as many many forms
of resistance. Furthermore, in the past few weeks people’s hearts
haven’t stopped breaking in the normal and awful ways human hearts
break. There is still a lot of need around us for patience and
compassion.

So,
I’m hoping that in the face of great suffering I might be able (on
good days) to share subversive grace: to share God’s love from a
place of peace and gratitude WHILE calling the world out of the
tragic gap and into the kin-dom. This will take times of quiet,
intentional reflection, deep conversation, and attending to hope,
gratitude and goodness. This will take paying attention to what
brings me energy – and doing those things. This will take a
regular practice of Sabbath, in particular Sabbath from the news
cycle. I got one of those this week and it made all the difference.

Finally,
I hope that my journey is of use to you as well. In the midst of her
own suffering, Job’s wife found the way to hear her husband’s pain
and respond to it with love, grace, and compassion. That’s
especially hard work right now. But, may God help us to treat
ourselves, and those we love, with similar love, grace, and
compassion. May we find our energy sources, good spiritual
practices, and the freedom to breath outside of the news cycle.
And, with God’s help, may it lower our anxiety and fill us with some
much needed peace. Amen

1Personal
Email, February 1, 2016.

2Parker
Palmer, Healing
the Heart of Democracy,
p. 191. Accessed at
http://www.couragerenewal.org/democracyguide/v36/
on February 2, 2017.

3Marvin
H. Pope, Job.
In
the Anchor Bible Series, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co, 1965)
page 22.

4Carol
A. Newsom “The Book of Job” in The New Interpreter’s Study
Bible Vol IV (Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 1996), page 355.

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

“Speaking the Truth No One Wants to Hear” based…

January 29, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I can think of no way to begin this sermon other than by apologizing: to any who have survived a sexual assault, for whom discussion of sexual assault escalates the remaining pain, I am sorry. Also, for those who have been yearning for a clergy person to acknowledge the harm done by sexual violence who have been harmed by the conversation not happening, I am sorry.

In the United States, 1 in 6 women and 1 in 33 men will experience an attempted or completed rape in their lifetimes. (Most attempts are completed.) To save you the math, 90% of rapes happen to women and 10% happen to men.¹ In terms of gender that means we need to remember that women are more likely to be living with the internal scars of sexual assault than men are AND that a substantial number of men are also living with internal scars of sexual assault. We also want to remember that members of the transgender community experience sexual assault at MUCH higher rates than cisgender people. More important than the statistics however, is to remember that one rape is one rape too many.

This should never happen.

And it happens a lot. Many people sexually assault others.

The story of King David’s daughter, the Princess Tamar, is a story of sexual assault. Unlike most such stories, Tamar’s story is told. Her story reflects and shines light on many stories that never got told, as well as on the experiences of those who told their stories but were not believed. Instead of having been insulated and protected by her royalty, the story of the princess reflects the experiences of many unnamed men and women throughout history.

Phyllis Trible, a matriarch of feminist biblical criticism, has a chapter on Tamar in her book Texts of Terror. She opens the chapter with these words, “From the book of Samuel comes the story of a family enmeshed in royal rape. Brother violates sister. He is a prince to whom belong power, prestige, and unrestrained lust. She is a princess to whom belong wisdom, courage, and unrelieved suffering. Children of one father, they have not the same care of each other. Indeed, the brother cares not at all.”²

This story comes soon after the one about King David’s adultery, his use of Bathsheba without her consent, and the prophet Nathan calling him on it. David’s shame is very present in the story, including in how he responds to it. Amnon, the lust-filled rapist, is his oldest son and heir. Absalom, Tamar’s full brother, is David’s third son.

The story SAYS that Amnon “fell in love with” Tamar but I think we can easily conclude that Amnon fell in lust with Tamar. This is not what love looks like. As a virgin daughter of the king, Tamar was highly valuable property, useful to be given away to other countries and brokering deals. That meant that she was “protected property, inaccessible to males, including her brother.”³ Amnon, the princely heir, doesn’t seem to like having anything stand in his way. He finds the person who gives him the advice he wants – that he should manipulate his father into giving him access to Tamar to fulfill his lust.

I must say, Trible points out that when Amnon feigns illness and worries his father, in his request that she be sent to him, Amnon refers to Tamar as his sister. She says, “To claim kinship with Tamar at this time averts suspicion.”⁴ I say, UGH.

Tamar does as she’s told. She doesn’t have many degrees of freedom, and the king had ordered her to go. The servants leave, she prepares the food, she brings it to Amnon, and then he grabs her. He demands that she sleep with him, again calling her his sister. Trible goes on, “Through a series of orders, all of them obeyed, Amnon has manipulated the occasion to feed his lust. This time, however, the royal command meets objection. In the presence of a rapist, Tamar panics not. In fact, she claims her voice. Unlike Amnon’s brisk commands, her deliberations slow the movement of the plot, though they are unable to divert it. If Amnon uses the vocative to seduce her, she returns it to summon him to sense.”⁵

Tamar has an unusually cool head. She didn’t panic nor beg. She spoke in reasonable terms and tried to talk him out of it. She pointed out that their country is above such things, which is a great argument to make in a royal family where the country would be valued especially highly. She points out that it would shame her, seemingly thinking he was capable of empathy. He does not seem to be. She names that it would ruin him, making him appear as a fool and a scoundrel. Finally, seeming to become clear that he wanted what he wanted and wouldn’t stop until he got it, she suggests an alternative. She points out that if he asked to marry her, he’d be allowed to, thus avoiding all the other disastrous consequences. Trible says, “Her words are honest and poignant; they acknowledge female servitude. Tamar knows Amnon can have her but pleads that he do it properly.”⁶

That she needs to make such an offer is heart-breaking. However, even the offer to wed the man bent on raping her is ignored. He doesn’t want to hear her speak– he wants to have her subservient and as he fantasized. The text simply says, “but he would not listen to her” and then goes on to say, “and being stronger than she was, he forced her and lay with her.”(13:14) Trible says the text is worse than it first appears in English, “the Hebrew omits the preposition to stress his brutality. ‘He laid her.’”⁷

And then it got worse.

The violence of the rape transformed the lust into hatred, and he ordered her to “Get out.” However, even in this moment of utter vulnerability and violation, Tamar held her own. Trible says, “This abused woman will no more heed Amnon’s order of dismissal than she consented to his demand for rape.”⁸ She responds with “NO.” And she stops calling him her brother. Trible continues, “’No,’ she said to him, ‘because sending me away is a greater evil than the other which you have done to me.’ (13:16a) If the narrator interprets that the hatred is greater than the desire, Tamar understands that the expulsion is greater than the rape. In sending her away, Amnon increases the violence he has inflicted on her. He condemns her to a lifelong sentence of desolation. Tamar knows that rape dismissed is crime exacerbated.”⁹ Again he doesn’t listen. She stops speaking.

Now, this seems to be worth taking a moment to acknowledge that Tamar’s story is not entirely universal and timeless. In her day, if an unmarried woman was raped, it was expected that the man would marry her. That was the least bad option for the woman, since otherwise she was seen as damaged goods which would prevent the possibility of a future marriage and thus the possibility of a financially stable future. Tamar, like other biblical women, was taught that her value was in her capacity to wed and bear male children. This rape AND expulsion violated her body and any hope she had of a future. It was a different time. Today we hope women don’t get stuck marrying their rapists. In any case, she kept her head, her reason, and her voice. But he doesn’t listen.

After she is kicked out and the door is barred to keep her from re-entering, she tears her robe. The robe proclaims her a virgin daughter of the King, and she isn’t anymore. Trible says, “tearing her robe symbolizes the violence done to a virgin princess. Rape has torn her.”¹⁰ She also puts ashes on her head and weeps publicly. She VISIBLY proclaims that wrong has been done to her. She doesn’t hide it. She doesn’t protect her “brother.” She lets her entire body scream for her, and she makes sure it gets listened to this time.

Her brother, her full brother Absalom, speaks to her. When the words are examined deeply, they are quite powerful. He is his sister’s advocate and he offers her a safe place. In this story Absalom is the one we can look to as a moral compass and seek to emulate. (I actually think Tamar is too high of a standard, being that strong, clear-minded and articulate in the face of that violence is not something to compare ourselves to.) Trible explains, “Absalom explicitly introduces this speech with the adverb ‘attāh, ‘now’ or ‘for the time being.’ As Amnon’s pretense deceived David, so Tamar’s pretense will deceive Amnon. Further, rather than minimizing the crime, euphemisms such as ‘with you’ or ‘this deed’ underscore its horror.”¹¹

Absalom starts by asking her if Amnon had raped her. He knows it is possible, and he acknowledges it. He also speaks the words, which means she doesn’t have to, in this case another means of grace. He is tender to her, he reminds her that they are still connected, and he comes up with a plan. He takes the harm done to his sister as real, significant, and relevant to him. She is his sister, that hasn’t changed. The text tells us he brought her into his house, since she was no longer a virgin princess living in the palace. He listened, he cared, and he made a space for her.

From the moments after the rape on Absalom takes charge. Trible suggests that it is in this moment that he supplants King David himself in the story.¹² David is said to be angry – but it is not clear if he is mad at Amnon or at “what happened to Amnon”? Trible says, “David’s anger signifies complete sympathy for Amnon and total disregard for Tamar. How appropriate that the story never refers to David and Tamar as father and daughter.”¹³ David does nothing, which leaves Absalom alone to respond to the harm done to his sister.

In the end of the story, Tamar is “desolate.” Trible explains, “When used of people elsewhere in scripture, the verb be desolate (šmm) connotes being destroyed by an animal (Lam. 3:11) Raped, despised, and rejected by a man, Tamar is a woman of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”¹⁴ And, in response to Amnon not listening to Tamar, Absalom stops speaking to Amnon as well. (Also, eventually, Absalom kills Amnon and then after that he leads a revolt against his father. David’s failure to respond destabilizes his throne. But this is Tamar’s story and we are going to stick with her.)

Her story, such as it is, is concluded in the following chapter. Trible explains again, starting with the Biblical quote, “’There were born to Absalom three sons and one daughter; her name was Tamar.’ (14:27. RSV). Strikingly the anonymity of the sons highlights the name of the lone female child. In her Absalom has created a living memorial for his sister. A further note enhances the poignancy of his act. Tamar, the daughter of Absalom, ‘became a beautiful woman to behold.’ From aunt to niece have passed name and beauty so that rape and desolation have not the final word in the story of Tamar.”¹⁵ Tamar, who would never have a child of her own did have a namesake so that her memory lived on.

One final thought from Trible about Tamar before we end, “she was never his temptation. His evil was his own lust, and from it others needed protection.”¹⁶

Dear ones, this story tells a truth we rarely hear, and it forces us to acknowledge the all too common reality of sexual assault. The Bible holds firmly that God abhors sexual violence, and this story adds that silence from leaders in the face of sexual violence only makes it worse. Yet, in the midst of the honest portrayal of horrific violence, the story also leaves us with hope. Absalom was an advocate for his sister and he gave her a safe-place to be. Because of those like Absalom, healing and life are possible, and violence need not have the last word. Absalom is the brother we hope to emulate when we seek to be brothers and sisters in Christ to one another. So, as we are able, may God help us to be safe places for survivors as Absalom was for Tamar. Amen

1RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) website, https://www.rainn.org/statistics/scope-problem, quote statistics from National Institute of Justice & Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, Prevalence, Incidence and Consequences of Violence Against Women Survey (1998). Accessed January 26, 2017.

2Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), page 37.

3Trible, 39

4Trible, 41.

5Trible, 45.

6Trible, 45-46.

7Trible, 46.

8Trible, 47.

9Trible, 48.

10Trible, 50.

11Trible, 51.

12Trible, 52.

13Trible, 53.

14Trible, 52.

15Trible, 55.

16Trible, 56.

–

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 29, 2017