#UMC – Page 18 – First United Methodist Church Schenectady

“Wesley v. Social Media: Sanctification”based on Romans 12

August 17, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

In
high school, a friend of mine remarked, “I think perhaps the
stories in the Bible show us the way that humans grow in
understanding God. We couldn’t do it all at once, so we have to go
through stages.” Or, at least she said something like that, it was
a while ago. We were in the midst of an intense year old Bible
Study, and we were trying to figured out why the stories in the Bible
often depicted God in ways that we couldn’t believe.

Her
thought has been with me while I’ve been bemoaning the inflexibility
of the church at large – both The United Methodist Church and The
Church Universal. Hopeful people have been approaching me over the
past month, delighted to be able to ask, “Hey, now that the Supreme
Court has made same-sex marriage legal in the whole United States,
the UMC will have to follow, right? Isn’t that great?”

It
would be great, if it were true. I’ve watched peoples’ faces fall as
I’ve replied that The United Methodist Church isn’t bound by US laws,
and that things aren’t going to get better in 2016, in fact they are
going to get worse. The nearly universal response has been, “Well,
then what WILL happen to the church?” My profoundly unhelpful
reply has been, “It will become less and less relevant.”

On
the hand, no one has ever come up to me hopeful about the fate of
Christianity, so I haven’t had to burst any bubbles there. That, in
and of itself, is sort of interesting, but interesting in a very sad
way. The Church has been The Keeper of a very specific set of
truths, a set that it decided and a set that it declared itself
protector of. Unfortunately, the set of truths that has been
protected hasn’t been allowed to grow, change, adapt, and become as
humanity has continued to develop. Truths that made sense before
germ theory don’t all work now. Truths that made sense before we knew
that our sun was just another star don’t all work now. Truths that
made sense before the creation of effective birth control don’t all
work now. Just as truth has been hardened and left to die in the
face of human knowledge, the closed cannon of the Bible struggles to
meet the needs of modern people. Now, most of you know, I have a
very strong love/hate relationship with the Bible, and I’m not ready
to throw it away yet! Yet, the Bible is full of stories of people
trying to make sense of life, of God, and of relationships. If we
want to continue to engage that process, it needs to continue to
reflect the struggles of humanity. Our Bible tells stories that are
said to range for about 1500 years, written down over the course of
700 years. But it stopped 1900 years ago. A tradition that stops
developing will die. A way of understanding the Divine that relies
only on ancient information can’t be relevant.¹

This
church, and now I’m speaking very specifically, First United
Methodist Church of Schenectady, is one of the very few churches who
don’t need to cling to ancient understandings of God and the
world. As I’ve experienced you, you are a people eager to find more
meaningful ways of knowing, in particular to find ways to integrate
the knowledge you have of the world with the ways you could
understand the Divine Energy that binds us all together. This sermon
is the start of a 5 week sermon series entitled “Would John Wesley
Drive a Prius?” trying to consider how Wesley’s concepts, ideas,
and even just his words fit into our lives today. It is an attempt,
at the very least, to keep the nearly 300 year Wesleyan tradition
alive by dragging it into the 21^st century.

The
word of the day is “sanctification.” Literally it means, “to
make holy.” As mentioned in my Spire Article this month, I would
give it a bit more flavor, saying “sanctification is the process of
becoming perfect in love.” John Cobb (famous Process Theologian
and United Methodist clergy person) goes a little bit less formal
when he says, “sanctification is spirituality.”²
But, surely, if we’re going to talk about John Wesley, we can let
him define his terms? John Wesley says that to be sanctified is “To
be restored in the image of God ‘in righteousness and true holiness’
(Ephesians 4:24).”³

Definitions
are nice and all, but we should probably start at the beginning.
John Wesley and others at his time shared a thee part understanding
of grace, which we can delve further into during the sermon on grace.
The key for now is that God’s grace (meaning God’s unconditional
love for us) is experienced in 3 different ways, depending on the
person’s relationship to God. “The grace that comes before”,
previenent grace, is God’s love for a person who does not know or
acknowledge God. Justifying grace is God’s love for a person as a
person comes to acknowledging God.⁴
Then, sanctifying grace is the way that God’s love works in and with
a person in from that point onward, and that process is called
sanctification. The end goal is perfection in love – to act out
the Love of God for each person in every word and action.

Sanctification
is the process of faith development that enables a person to become
ever more loving by connecting every further with love. Rev. Dr.
Carothers used to talk about the point of the church being “to
establish and maintain connections of mutual support in an ever
widening circle of concern” which I think is yet another definition
of sanctification, this time with an inherent communal bent. Now
that, I think, we have a clue what it is, the question is: does it
still matter??? Is this a term that reflects something relevant and
real in our lives today, or is a reflection of an argument from 300
years ago that has proven itself useless with time? At least for me,
the answer isn’t immediately obvious. Yes, growing in love is still
pretty much the point. Yet, it seems that the biggest questions are
around how that happens than if it should.

I
want to poke around in our text today for some clues from even longer
ago. Paul suggests that those seeking to live like Jesus needed an
open mindset in order to figure how how to act in ways that are good
and “perfect.” Hmmm. It requires humility, Paul says, and an
awareness that we’re interconnected and each of us are dependent on
the abilities of the whole. Paul then gives some specific
instructions. “Let love be genuine,” which is definitely lovely
although perhaps not particularly easy to apply. “Hold fast to
what is good; love one another with mutual affection, outdo one
another in showing honor.” The list goes on, but it is a very
tangible description of ways that people might act if they are
seeking to live in ever greater Love.

The
precedent for sanctification is in this text, as well as in others.
As we will continue to see, John Wesley’s ideas are solidly based in
scripture. Obviously, continuing to grow into greater love is a
great description of the goal! The goal of of faith development, or
human maturing, or progress, or church or whatever you want to call
it. We’re aiming to continually grow into a greater capacity to
love. The question is HOW we do so! Wesley had answers for that
too, called the means of grace. In updated language, his answer was
that we become more loving by a combination of 4 balanced factors:
personal spiritual development, communal spiritual development, by
living kindness in our individual lives, and by seeking justice in
our communal lives.⁵
The idea is that if any of the 4 were missing things would get out
of whack.

The
problem, of course, is that these categories still leave a lot to be
desired in terms of definition.
There are particular examples of each of them, i.e. for personal
spiritual development the traditional list includes, “reading,
meditating and studying the scriptures, prayer, fasting,
regularly attending worship, healthy living, and sharing our
faith with others “ while for communal spiritual development
it is, “regularly share in the sacraments, Christian
conferencing (accountability to one another), and Bible study”⁶

This
is the place where I think it is reasonable to break with tradition.
While nothing is necessarily WRONG with the lists as given, they also
aren’t particularly RIGHT. They don’t really reflect the ways that
things have changed over the past 300 years or so, and I don’t know
that they really make space for us to have a different understanding
of God than was normal then. If you were here in January, you might
be thinking, “but Sara, you preached on this in January and said
the lists were fine!” I did. I don’t anymore. Thinking about
growing in love today, with a particular Jesus flavor, those are not
the lists I would make. Um, a stagnant understanding of God and the
world is dying, so its OK if I change my mind?? 😉

I’m
approaching sanctification from a new angle now, one that I’ve never
looked at it from before. It comes from the continuing education
I’ve done this year and the books I’ve been reading and what has been
working in my attempts to become more loving. Right now, it seems
that the task of becoming more loving in the world requires finding
ways to love the parts of myself that hard hardest to love: making
peace with their existence, listening to their wisdom, growing into a
fuller sense of myself by being all that I am all together at once
instead of trying to hide away parts of myself. It sounds a little
bit like Paul’s body metaphor brought back to the body! Perhaps
that’s a big piece that’s been missing from traditional
understandings of growing in love – it isn’t about jettisoning
pieces of ourselves because they are “bad.” Rather, it is about
learning that love applies to all parts of ourselves and all parts of
others, and figuring out how to learn from all parts what love can
be! In finding ways to accept myself as I am, I make space to do the
same for others, and to let go of the fear that comes as I see pieces
of others that I haven’t accepted in myself. Please note though,
this is an idea that is still in development.

Another
thought on 21^st
century sanctification comes via John Cobb who points out that in
Wesley’s writing “entire sanctification is depicted not as a
continuing state but as a matter of moment by moment life.”⁷
That is, it breaks in a moment first. We don’t become entirely more
loving all at once. But there are moments when we manage to act in
love and then with time and practice they come more frequently. This
means we can practice growing in love in even the most mundane of
21^st
century activities. That is, when we tween or text, facebook post or
snapchat, instagram or linkin, or EVEN just if we talk to each other
for a moment face to face, we have the chance in that interaction
with other people to have a moment of sanctification. We just need
to have a moment when all we act out is love, and it is allowed to be
brief! It can be sort of instant gratification. John Wesley didn’t
think of that though 😉

There
isn’t a sermon talk back today, but I’d like to hear what really has
worked. If you are willing, however you want to get back to me,
would you let me know: what has helped you grow in love in your life?
And what has broken open barriers that were previously closed to
love in your life? We can learn from each other,, and that would
lead us all down the road to Wesley’s probably not outdated concept
of sanctification. May it be so! Amen

1 None
of this is a quote. But my thinking was clarified by reading John
Shelby Spong’s “A New Christianity For a New World” which is a
truly fantastic text that finally put into words many of the issues
I’ve been freed to struggle with since coming to this church. And
my clarified thinking via the book made it seem important to
footnote for two reasons: 1. Attribution is appropriate and 2. Read
the book!!! And if you’ve read it, talk to me about it!
2 John
B. Cobb Jr, Grace and Responsibility: A Wesleyan Theology for
Today (Abingdon Press:
Nashville, 1995), p. 100.
3 A
Perfect Love: Understanding John Wesley’s ’A Plain Account of
Christian Perfection’
Modern Language Version and notes by Steven W Manskar (Discipleship
Resources: Nashville, 2004), p. 33.
4 This
is a heck of a soft-pedal. We’ll get to it in a few weeks.
5 For
the geeks who want to know more, from
http://www.umc.org/how-we-serve/the-wesleyan-means-of-grace
Works
of Piety
Individual
Practices –
reading, meditating and studying the scriptures, prayer,
fasting, regularly attending worship, healthy living, and
sharing our faith with others
Communal
Practices –
regularly share in the sacraments, Christian conferencing
(accountability to one another), and Bible study
Works
of Mercy
Individual
Practices –
doing good works, visiting the sick, visiting those in prison,
feeding the hungry, and giving generously to the needs of
others
Communal
Practices –
seeking justice, ending oppression and discrimination (for instance
Wesley challenged Methodists to end slavery), and addressing
the needs of the poor
6 ibid
7 Cobb,
111.

______

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

“John Wesley v. Race Relations: Grace” based on Galatians 3:27-29…

August 17, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

This
week Target announced its intentions to remove gendered labels from
its toy and children’s bedding sections. They also intend to remove
gender clues – like the blue or pink background of the shelves.
Foxnews.com started their article on this change in this way, “Target
stores are undergoing a sex change of sorts.”¹
Many people seemed to respond to the news as Fox covered it – as if
Target was attacking gender, and they attacked back.

They
told Target that they’d take their business elsewhere, because they
were traditional people who loved their children. That is, they
spoke as if their lives and values were under attack. I think, for
many people, they were. Now, I don’t think that the concept of
gender is particularly fragile, and I have no concerns that it is
about to break. So I don’t think it is in need of vigilantes
defending the importance of placing Barbies on shelves with a pink
background. At the same time, if gender roles are one of the primary
ways that people make sense of the world, then defending the roles,
and defending the ways the roles are formed, would be a way of
preserving the world as one knows it and in this mindset, as it
should be.

It
is easy enough to understand why people, who are aware of changes
happening all around them, might choose to cling to the social norms
that help them make sense of the world. The fear that could come
with sensing change and feeling out of control could easily arise
into a desire to maintain the norms you have always known. However,
it is dangerous.

People
experienced their values and ways of life under attack with this
news, and they attacked in kind. There are all kinds of ways that
behaviors like this happen in our society. Most often as a society
we encourage others to behave as we see fit through passive
aggressive comments, but more extreme measures, including violence,
are used as well. It amazes me, actually, how strongly people
associate their security and well-being with the maintenance of
social norms.

The
value placed on social norms relates to the high murder rate for
trans women of color. In the United States, the murder rate is 4.5
people out of 100,000 people every year².
Or, 1 in 22,222. The murder rate for trans women of color is 1
person out of 8.³
That makes it about 3000x higher than the US average. 3000. Times.
Higher. MURDER. Rates. The mere existence of trans women of color
threatens people so profoundly that they get killed. The combination
of racism, sexism, and gender normativity has proven deadly at
enormously high rates.

People
will go to extremes – including extremes of violence – to
maintain their world view and the social norms. This is also true of
the myths we live by. The reasons for slavery were profit, but
church leaders and theologians used their authority and the authority
of the Bible to justify it.⁴
They were part of the creation of the theory of race.

Yes,
the theory of race was created
to justify the money made for slave owners by the labor of slaves.
The myth called race theory has killed millions of people. I have
read about this before, but I reviewed my knowledge this week by
reading a paper by Audrey Smedley, Professor of Anthropology Emerita
Virginia Commonwealth University. She says,
“Race
originated as a folk idea and ideology about human differences; it
was a social invention, not a product of science. Historians have
documented when, and to a great extent, how race as an ideology came
into our culture and our consciousness.”⁵
“English laws had terminated all forms of slavery centuries before
their arrival in the Americas.”⁶

The
differentiation between poor workers in the colonies started because
of the fear created by the Bacon rebellion in 1676. It was a threat
to the social stability of the time. Smedley explains, “The
decisions that the rulers of the colony made during the last decades
of the 17th century and the first quarter of the 18th century
resulted in the establishment of racial slavery. They began to pass a
series of laws separating out Africans and their descendants,
restricting their rights and mobility, and imposing a condition of
permanent slavery on them. … Some colony leaders began to argue
that Africans had no rights under British laws and therefore could be
subject to forced labor with impunity.”⁷

She
continues, “Colonial leaders were … laying the basis for the
invention of race and racial identities. They began to homogenize all
Europeans, regardless of ethnicity, status, or social class, into a
new category. The first time the term “White,” rather than
“Christian” or their ethnic names (English, Irish, Scots,
Portuguese, German, Spanish, Swede) appeared in the public record was
seen in a law passed in 1691 that prohibited the marriage of
Europeans with Negroes, Indians, and mulattoes (Smedley 2007, 118). A
clearly separated category of Negroes as slaves allowed newly freed
European servants opportunities to realize their ambitions and to
identify common interests with the wealthy and powerful. Laws were
passed offering material advantages and social privileges to poor
whites. In this way, colony leaders consciously contrived a social
control mechanism to prevent the unification of the working poor
(Allen 1997).”⁸

From
this early history, we gained the conception of race. A final note
by Smedley, “In the 1860s, slavery ended, but “race” as social
status and the basis of our human identities remained. Race ideology
proclaimed the existence of separate, distinct, and exclusive groups
that were made unequal by God or nature.”⁹

The
intentional creation of race, for the purpose of legitimizing the
barbarous act of slavery – already known to be barbarous for
centuries in British law – but necessary to turn a profit has
dehumanized human beings and legitimized their murders for nearly 400
years.

We
see, almost every day now, the impact of this theory on the lives of
people in our country. The creation of race theory was not only the
creation of a theory about so-called “blacks” but also the
creation of the idea of so-called “whites.” Since then it has
expended to define and separate people into various “categories”
of humanity with associated stereotypes. The categories also have
associated murder rates. People of color, both men and women, young,
middle aged and old are being killed in our country, including by our
police forces at atrocious rates. The THEORY of RACE is still
perpetuating its evil. It
is time to throw the theory out and replace it with a better one.

A
better world view comes from a more ancient source. Paul says,
“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free,
there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ
Jesus.” As followers of Jesus, we are not to buy into social norms
about race, or gender, or any theory that some humans have value and
others don’t. There is no distinction. We are united. We are one.
A harm to any individual is a harm to us all.

The
gospel passage about the Syrophoenician woman comes to the same point
as Paul! Ched Myers, author of Binding
the Strong Man,
points out that the woman’s “solicitation is an affront to the
honor status of Jesus: no woman, and especially a gentile, unknown
and unrelated to this Jew, would have dared invade his privacy at
home to seek a favor. A rebuff by Jesus thus is not only
understandable but expected.”¹⁰
And the dog comment was REALLY insulting. But she doesn’t give up!
She argues back with him. Which was a further affront to his honor.
Yet, at that point he concedes the argument, acknowledges her point,
and
heals her daughter, thereby extending his ministry outside of Jewish
boundaries. And it is said that he heals her daughter because of her
ARGUMENT, not her faith!! To go back to the words of Myers, “Jesus
allows himself to be ‘shamed’ (becoming ‘least’) in order to include
this pagan woman in the new community of the kingdom; so too Judaism
will have to suffer the indignity of redefining its group boundaries
(collective honor) in order to realize that gentiles are now welcomed
as equals.”¹¹

I
love the words. “Judaism will have to suffer the indignity of
redefining its group boundaries in order to realize that gentiles are
now welcomed as
equals.”
Doesn’t it sound like the work of transforming race theory? It also
sounds like the work of grace, the unmerited favor and love of God
which we all experience whether we realize it or not.

Grace
is God’s love for us. We are not expected to be up to the standard
of offering pure unmerited favor and love to others AND YET it is the
goal of Methodists to put aside the things that keep us from being
able to do so until nothing but God’s love lives in us – that is –
until grace can shine through us. We’re at trying to attain life
lived as grace.

By
both of our texts today, we are challenged to extend the love of God
beyond any reasonable boundary – to all people. In Christ we are
called beyond the things that separate us, beyond the things that
define us, into wholeness with God and with each other. Social norms
don’t stand in the way of grace. We are to throw away anything that
gets in the way of living toward grace, including social norms.

Grace
is the most defining doctrine of United Methodists, likely based on
the theology of John Wesley which was entirely focused on it. It is
so our thing that Amazing Grace is our favorite song by a landslide.
Of all United Methodists, 39% claim it as their favorite song.¹²
And grace, it seems, is the essential way to transform the world.
It leads us to compassion. It leads us to humanizing other people.
It stretches us beyond our comfort zones and our safe places. It
takes our norms and chops them to pieces, and in doing so makes space
for joy and love and wonder to abound.

In
this sermon series, in addition to all the other things that have
been happening, I’ve been sharing some of the ways I’ve recently felt
free to name and understand the Divine. John Shelby Spong in A
New Christianity for a New World
discusses the idea of God as the ultimate source of love. He says,
“One worships this God by loving wastefully, by spreading love
frivolously, by giving love away without stopping to count the
cost.”¹³

Sisters
and brothers – that’s it. That’s God. That’s the gospel. That’s
the Epistle. That’s John Wesley’s point in new words. That’s the
solution to race theory. Love wastefully, and let others see it.
Wasteful, boundless, ridiculous, wonderful love – grace – changes
the world. Thanks be to God. Amen

1 Cody
Derespina, “Target
going gender neutral in some sections” on published on August 13,
2015 at
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/08/13/target-going-gender-neutral-in-some-sections/
Accessed August 15, 2015
2 https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/tables/1tabledatadecoverviewpdf/table_1_crime_in_the_united_states_by_volume_and_rate_per_100000_inhabitants_1993-2012.xls
3 http://www.transstudent.org/transvisibility
4 Summary
of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States
chapter 2: “Drawing the Color Line” (Perennial Classics, USA,
1980)
5 Audrey
Smedley “THE HISTORY OF THE IDEA OF RACE… AND WHY IT MATTERS”
a paper presented at the conference “Race, Human Variation and
Disease: Consensus and Frontiers,” sponsored by the American
Anthropological Association (AAA) on March 14-17, 2007 in
Warrenton, Virginia. Found at
http://www.understandingrace.org/resources/pdf/disease/smedley.pdf
on August 15, 2015, page 2.
6 Smedley,
3.
7 Smedley,
4
8 Smedley,
6.
9Smedley,
7.
10Ched
Myers, Binding the Strong Man
(Orbis Books: Maryknoll, NY, 1988, 2008), page 203.
11 Myers,
204.
12 http://www.kintera.org/atf/cf/%7B3482e846-598f-460a-b9a7-386734470eda%7D/survey1.pdf
13 John
Shelby Spong A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional
Faith is Dying and How a New Faith is Being Born
(HarperSanFrancisco, 2001) page 72.

_____

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady
on August 16, 2015