Christmas Dawn Meditation

December 25, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I know its early, and I know it is Christmas, so I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to say this, but I’m really sick of this story. By my rough estimations I’ve read it about 500 times, and maybe 100 of those out-loud. It isn’t really that good. Frankly, of the whole story we’re given only 2 verses that really have anything to do with Jesus being born and they’re pretty anticlimactic. But, again, I know it is early and I know it is Christmas and none of you got out of bed this morning to hear me whine about the Lukan birth narrative. I’m not sure any of you got out of bed to listen to me do exegesis either, but oh well 😉 As sick as I am of this story, these 14 verses still have surprises left in them. This year it is the geography that jumped out at me. It is only in the past few years that I’ve really understood Galilee and Judea. To be direct about it, Judea, the Southern Kingdom, that came back from exile in 538 BCE was the land of the “Jews.” That is, the word Jew comes from Judah who was the primary ancestor of the Southern Kingdom. The Northern Kingdom – Israel – which went into exile first in 722 BCE, never returned. The “10 lost tribes” did not regain their previous existence as a country. This tends to become relevant when we’re talking about the Good Samaritan or the Samaritan Woman at the well, because the Samaritans were the hated Northern neighbors of Judea, the place where people who had once been followers of the same God had deviated and intermarried and not got it all WRONG.

The weird thing is that Galilee is NORTH of Samaria. So all the things that we say about Samaria should be true of Galilee. Galilee should be an area of outcasts who don’t follow God correctly, but it isn’t! The difference was a policital one.
Judean leaders decided to colonize Galilee as an outpost of Jewish thought and culture, and they had! The Galilean backwater was an experiment in exporting the “true faith” of the Judeans up into the north. The three areas were then very different. Judea with Jerusalem – and Bethlehem – was the center of Jewish life. Samaria, directly to the north, was distinct enemy territory (which is really dumb since the Empire was the real problem, but that’s how humans work, right?). To the north of Samaria was Galilee, the backwater colony of Jewish thought and life, a place to go if your family couldn’t make it in Judea.
Mary and Joseph were from Nazarath, a TINY town in Galilee. Jesus was from Nazareth. It is one of the few facts about Jesus that can be even a little bit historically validified. Jesus, the Nazarean – that’s how he was KNOWN.
And yet both Matthew and Luke go through great pains to explain how Jesus – known as a Nazarene – was ACTUALLY born in Bethlehem. They come up with two very different answers. Matthew suggests that the family was originally from Bethlehem but after the Magi left, Joseph had a dream and they went off to Egypt to hide away for a few years and then when they moved back they moved to Nazareth. Luke comes up with the census narrative, which is cute, but has no historical basis. And even if there was a census, NO census makes you go to the land of your ancestors. EVERY country wants you to register according to where you live (and pay taxes.)
But David was born in Bethlehem, and David was the great king. The awaited Messiah was supposed to be a New David. And the Gospel writers wanted to make their points abundantly clear. The new King was, also, like David, born in Bethlehem. It is where Jacob’s wife Rachel died. It is where Ruth the Moabite settled. The great kingS were born there.

Bethlehem is a 100 mile walk from Nazareth, and that’s without the struggle of getting around Samaria. Bethlehem is near enough to Jerusalem (about 17 miles). Jesus, whose ministry centered around the Galilean backwater, is said to be born and die in the same places as King David.

If the Gospel writers do so much creative work to connect Jesus to David, there must be theological significance for them in it. Luke also does a lot of work to place Jesus in the political context of the day. Throughout the first two chapters Luke reminds us again and again who the power players were in the Empire. This poor boy was born into a world that already had rich, famous, and extraordinarily powerful men in it. And he was born in the city of the King.

And then, Luke, tells us that the announcement of the birth of Jesus was made the SHEPHERDS. Shepherds were despised at the time of Jesus, they were seen as thieves of a sort – because they were always grazing their sheep on other people’s land. (Which happens when all the land is privately owned.) They were USELESS. But after telling us about the Men who Ran the Empire, after doing all that work to put Jesus in Bethlehem, Luke goes on to describe in explicit detail an interaction between the angels of God and the shepherds up in the hills.

Now, to be fair, David was a shepherd. So maybe Luke was just going over his point again. The more I study Luke, the more I can believe it. Of all the Gospel writers, he is the smartest and the best story teller. He’d weave something like that in on purpose. But he also choose to talk about shepherds. Matthew talks about Magi. Luke’s shepherds IMMEDIATELY differentiate the sort of King that Jesus is going to be.

He’s born in the City of David. He’ll ride triumphant into Jerusalem and die there like David did. But his kingship isn’t going to look anything like David’s. He isn’t going to take the throne. He isn’t going to lead an army. He isn’t going to go through political machinations to increase his power. Jesus is going to be the one who pays attention to the poor, the sick, the women and children, the powerless, the refugees, and gives them ways to help each other. He is going to call the powerful away from their power. He is going turn the world upside down, and wash his disciples’ feet, and change what even power means. He’s the son of a backwater carpenter and a teenage mother. And while we’ve all but forgotten the other great man whose names appear in his birth story – other than their appearance in his birth story – we’re still getting out of bed before Dawn to celebrate the wonder of the one who brought peace to earth and purpose to our lives. Born in the City of David, but from Nazareth. Isn’t that everything all at once? Jesus wasn’t a part of the power structure of Judea, but he changed the world more than any of them did. All the contrasts, conflicts and wonders of Jesus! Isn’t it great? Merry Christmas! Amen

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
http://fumcschenectady.org/

December 25, 2015

Sermons

“Rejoice!?”based on Luke 3:7-18

December 13, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

In
the book Debt:
The First 5,000 Years,
David Graeber writes,

“If
one is on sociable terms with someone, it’s hard to completely ignore
their situation. Merchants often reduce prices for the needy. This
is one of the main reasons why shopkeepers in poor neighborhoods are
almost never of the same ethnic group as their customers; it would be
almost impossible for a merchant who grew up in the neighborhood to
make money, as they would be under constant pressure to give
financial breaks, or at least easy credit terms, to their
impoverished relatives and school chums.”¹

What
intrigues me about the “good news” of the John the Baptist is
that he completely ignores this universal reality. He speaks with
the same expectations and demand to everyone, regardless of their
relationships to each other. He is calling people back into
community, and they aren’t even community!

He
starts out being sort of nasty, I tried to wiggle out of preaching
this text because I rather dislike the brood of vipers language, but
upon examination he is saying radically loving things. (I have come,
rather despite myself, to really like John the Baptism. It turns out
most of my assumptions about him have proven entirely untrue.) John
calls on all the people to change their lives, he doesn’t just ask it
of the leaders or of the wealthy. He makes the same demands on
everyone who comes.

To
the crowds who have gathered, he demands a morality of sharing. No
one should have two coats while anyone has none. This is a standard
that makes a lot of sense, right? It isn’t trivial though. The
person who has two coats may feel as if they’ve²
earned them, or they really like them, or they are aware of the
differing fashion needs they respond to!! They may feel that they
aren’t their brother’s keeper, or that there are too many people
without coats to have the coatless be their responsibility.

That
is, they may not experience the other person as an extension of
themselves. In functional families, it would not go that way. If
there were 4 people and 4 coats, the distribution would not be such
that 2 people and 2 coats and 2 people had no coats. In a functional
family, 4 coats for 4 people would be distributed 1 coat per person.
Calling on people to give away extra coats, and extra food, is
calling on them to take each other’s well-being as extensions of
their own. That is something we naturally do for people we love and
are in relationship to. John calls for the extension of that
community. (This is the problem I have with trying to dislike John.
He sounds like Jesus.) He calls for it to extend without limit.

To
the tax collectors, John also extended a challenge. His words are
deceptively simple.

“Collect
no more than the amount prescribed for you.” That would, again,
be something we might expect to happen in a family. If the tax
collector came to the house of their cousin, they wouldn’t ask for
more than they were required to ask! This is an extension of
fairness to the whole community. It is treating each person as
someone you’d care about.³

The
final group that John is said to speak to is the soldiers. They are
probably the most interesting group. This is not because of what
John tells them, it is an extension of what he suggest to the tax
collectors: don’t take money you aren’t entitled to. What is
interesting is that they were there at all. The soldiers were Roman
soldiers. Why were they coming out to a radical Jewish prophet in
the wilderness? What was it about being part of the power structure
of the empire, or maybe even more simply about being human, that led
them to banks of the Jordan River and the preachings of the Wild One
seeking a better life? What were they expecting? Did they find it?
Did any of them follow it? Did they have a better life afterward?

The
challenge to the soldiers, while equivalent, may be even harder than
the rest of what John said because he calls on them to treat people
like family and they aren’t from the same group AT ALL. They are
different ethnically, and linguistically, and religiously. The
soldiers were the threat of force maintaining the empire and its
power to take wealth from the poor and transfer it to the wealthy.
John doesn’t call on them to stop being soldiers, he just calls on
them to be GOOD soldiers, and to let go of their greed, and to see
the humanity of the people they were (theoretically not) occupying.

Then
John goes back into a statement that I find cringe worthy. He speaks
of Jesus and says, “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his
threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the
chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.“ This is called good
news! And it is. Christianity has done some terrible things. One
of them is assuming that there are good people and bad people and God
loves and forgives the good people while sending the bad people to
hell. Unfortunately, that’s the first thing I hear in this passage.
But I don’t think it is an appropriate reading of the passage.
Instead, I think it is consistent with the rest of the passage. As
Rev. Dr. Barbara Thorington Green says, the line between the wheat
and the chaff is not between people, it is within each of us.

This
is a passage of hope. God’s work includes taking away the greedy,
lifeless, selfish parts of ourselves so that we can be freed for
connection, love, and wholeness. The burning of the chaff is the
permanent removal of the things that hold us back from love, and the
making of space for love. This is a process of sanctification.

The
paradigm of the wheat and chaff is easily translatable into an
extension of Isaiah’s beautiful vision. In that vision, God offers
well-springs of joy for us to draw from; strength and might of the
Divine to trust in; and freedom from fear. It is a vision of joy and
beauty.

All
week I’ve been thinking about what it means to rejoice in the midst
of the quiet waiting of Advent. I’ve also been thinking about what
it means to call for joy when there is so much pain around us. I’m
not just talking about mass shootings and Islamophobia in our
society. I’m also profoundly aware of the many in our midst who are
grieving. For some among us the wounds are fresh or unhealed. For
others the holiday season itself is a source of pain. And we live in
a broken world. Many of us, me included, have too many coats. And
far too many people have none. The relationships that lead us to
sharing and wholeness are often not present in our lives.

To
go back to David Gaeber, he proposes that
“sharing is not simply about morality, but also about pleasure.
Solitary pleasures will always exist, but for most human beings, the
most pleasurable activities almost always involve sharing something:
music, food, liquor, drugs, gossip, drama, beds. There is a certain
amount of communism of the senses at the root of most things we
consider fun.”⁴
He says that we tend to share best with those we consider equals.
I’m not sure that John was proposing charity at all – in the sense
that charity is a gift of undeserved love to a stranger. Instead, I
think John was proposing making people family. When that happens,
the sharing follows naturally. (This is why anyone who has ever
researched it has said that socio-economically diverse neighborhoods
are best for everyone in a society.)

Joy
comes, at least in large part, by sharing the goodness of life with
each other. Isn’t that interesting? So much of what society tells
us is simply wrong. It isn’t about acquisition or outdoing each
other. It is about the wonder of experience together. There is
plenty of sorrow and sadness to go around these days, but there are
ways to pick ourselves up to. Thanks be to God! Amen

1David
Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years
(Brooklyn and London: Melville House, 2011), p. 102.

2As
of this week the Washington Post style guide has approved of using
“they/them” in the singular. This is helpful both for the
transgender community and for speaking without having to name a
gender for a person. On that basis, despite some old teaching that
rankles, I’m going to follow their lead.

3
I will note, however, that this is historically complicated. The
system in Rome as I understand it did not involve having a pay scale
for tax collectors. Instead, they were permitted to acquire both
the taxes they’d pass on and their own income as they determined
necessary. Therefore I’m not quite sure how this would work in
practice, but let’s leave it be and hope I’m just missing something.

4Graeber,
99.

December 13, 2015

Sermons

“Smooth Ride” based on Luke 1:68-79, Baruch 5:1-9, Luke 3:1-6

December 6, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Whenever possible, I pick a window seat when I fly. I am endlessly mesmerized by the alternative view of the world it provides. There is the strange perspective shifting of take off and landing, when people, cars, houses, and roads either shrink or grow as the plane changes altitude. There is powerful metaphor that it is ALWAYS a sunny day – above the clouds – its just that sometimes we can’t see it. Once, I watched a multi-hour sunset as the plane and the rotation of the earth kept time with each other. Most frequently though, my attention is drawn by the patterns of nature and of human impact on nature.

Somehow, it doesn’t get old to fly by mountains and notice that the snow is deeper on the north side than on the south, or to look at streams running into rivers and see fractals emerge. Nor have I yet ceased to be interested in how fields and roads are formed around the natural elements of plains, mountains and water. I’m amazed at how strong humankind is in changing the nature of the world, and in how strong the elements of the world are in impacting human behavior.

A few weeks ago I was sitting in a window seat on the way home from Wisconsin, and I watched the rolling mountain/hills of the Appalachians, the roads running in the valleys, the valleys visibly distanced from one another. I looked for the roads between the valleys, and found one. It mostly went over the mountains, but in a few cases, it was visible from the plane, that the mountains had been cut in two so the road could pass on level ground. The valleys were connected, presumably the use of a whole lot of dynamite.

That’s crazy. We live in a world where mountains are cut in half for our roads. Or, at times tunnels are cut through them. Similarly, we have tunnels under rivers and bridges over them. Very little stops us from building roads and traversing the world.

It has not always been so. The prophesy we heard in Baruch which was also in Isaiah and was quoted in Luke was an impossible vision when it was written. Roads weren’t flat, nor straight, nor particularly easy to travel in ancient times. Mountains had to be gone over, or around. Valleys had to be gone down into, or around. Rivers had to be crossed without bridges, and perhaps worse than all of that for Biblical literature, deserts had to be crossed without access to potable water.

That’s why it was such a great vision. Only God could raise up valleys and drop down mountains and shade the way home through the desert. It was impossible for humans. But God could, and the vision says that God WOULD. It was a vision of hope, one that encouraged resiliency. The end had not come, there was more that God would be up to and it would be so good that the people wouldn’t even be able to believe it possible.

They did go home, but the path wasn’t smooth. The vision remained, even after its initial use had been fulfilled. I think that’s a sign of good literature – it has even layers of meaning that when the most obvious one is no longer relevant the text is still relevant. The vision gets quoted here in Luke again, because the power of the empire of Rome felt a little bit like the exiles’ experience in Babylon, and there was a need to connect again to this impossible hope. We noticed something in my lectionary group this week. By the time of Jesus, this impossible vision wasn’t so impossible anymore. Rome built roads, and they built GOOD roads. They made it possible to travel where it had not been possible, and made it a whole lot smoother of a ride. I wonder if Luke wrote this with the nostalgia of yearning for roads and with the awareness that the capacity of humans had changed, or if he just hadn’t NOTICED. (Sometimes things change and we don’t notice.)

Granted, Roman roads didn’t quite qualify as the wholeness of the vision. Frankly, our roads don’t either. We can split a rolling hill in the Appalachian range in two, but we aren’t there yet with the Rockies, and while we’ve done amazing work with bridges and tunnels, anyone who has fought traffic going into or out of NYC knows that physical barriers are still a reality. And, anyone who has driven… say… in the city of Schenectady knows that the ride is not generally smooth. (Seriously, how on earth are we going to get through winter and the road damage it brings when things are already this bad??)

Regardless, the Isaiah passage quoted in Luke is intriguing because it is set into it’s Lukan context. It is, to some degree, still about roads, but it is also about leveling the playing field, as is much of the Bible’s poetry. The interplay of the today’s passages intrigue me. I don’t usually include apocryphal texts in worship, but I loved this one too much to ignore it. It is the epitome of hopeful restoration language, and it fits SO WELL into this this second Sunday of Advent when we focus on our yearning for peace. It not only talks about mountains dropping and valleys lifting and shade trees protecting the travelers, it talks about the people as God’s Glory, and as Righteous Peace and as mercy and light.

And it sounds enough like Mary’s Magnificant to take the parallels seriously.

[God] has shown strength with [God’s ]arm;
[and] has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
[God] has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
[God] has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.

Both the road home and societies tend to be in need of leveling, and some respite of shade. In the joint meaning of the songs of Luke chapter one, we are reminded about God who doesn’t care about our status quo. God isn’t interested in who is higher up a hierarchy, God is interested in taking care of all the people, and that usually means lifting up the bottom, and filling it in with the extra from the top. A level playing field takes better care of all of God’s people. Please note that this doesn’t inverse reality: it isn’t that the poor become rich and the rich become poor. It is that everyone moves toward the middle ground. It is like the opposite of our world today: instead of growing income inequality, Luke 1 envisions growing income equality.

I think the most interesting character in today’s reading is Zechariah. Zechariah is identified multiple times as John the Baptist’s father and was an old priest. That meant that he was in the upper class and a descendent of Aaron. The story goes that he and his wife were barren. Those who have been in the Young Adult Study on Genesis know where this is going. Elizabeth was past child bearing years, and then got pregnant with John. Zechariah (whose name means, “God remembered”) is struck mute for the length of the pregnancy for his disbelief that this would come to pass. When the child is born, his mother wishes to name him John (which means “God’s gift”), but the people are horrified that she isn’t’ naming him for his father. He writes (further proof that he is upper class) “his name is John” and his mouth is opened again.

When it is open he speaks the first of the Luke passages we heard today, which is spectacular. It is also sort of weird for an upper class, entitled priest to say! It is all about God’s inversions in the world, and usually the people who are empowered by a system aren’t the ones who yearn to change it.

Zechariah also shows up, in name at least, in the second Luke passage about John’s ministry in the desert. This is quite curious. If Zechariah was an upper class man, a priest in the hereditary order of Aaron, then his son would have been too. Instead we meet John on the outskirts of society, teaching, preaching, and baptizing in the Jordan River. John forwent the privilege he was born into, and the gospel tells us that instead he spent his life “preparing the way of the Lord.”

That is, his work was to make the paths straight and smooth. Its funny though, the way of the Lord that John prepares seems ALSO to be the way of the Lord that Jesus worked on. I always thought, as a child at least, that John was preparing the way for Jesus. But this passage suggests that both John and Jesus are preparing the way for the people to connect with God and come home to the ways of God. The leveled road makes the journey easier, it also creates a more just society.

The level road is the way of peace, and it is hard to build, but worth working on anyway. If any people at any time in human history have known that, we are among them. We are people living in a society where mass murder has become normal, where special interest groups and the desires of profit-industry prevent change to our laws, and where we see with increasing clarity the disparity of violence in our world. As if the regular gun violence wasn’t enough, the response of our society is to demonize Muslims and dark-skinned people in response, making the actual shootings only the beginning of the problems we face. We take our pre-existence prejudices and add them into the pain and suffering in our society.

Over the past few years I’ve tried not to demonize gun rights supporters. As weak as it sounds, I have friends who own guns, and they aren’t bad people. I grew up in an area that prized deer hunting, and I see the value of hunting rifles (although, SERIOUSLY, if you are going to kill animals for sport, I think you should make it a little bit more of an actual challenge and go bow hunting). I can’t figure out the value of pistols, but at the moment I’m willing to let that go. The biggest problem we have is that military style assault rifles are legal to buy and use in our country. Without wanting to demonize anyone, and while wanting to participate in a genuine conversation with those with whom I disagree, I find that it is time to make an unambiguous statement: The only purpose of assault rifles is to kill a lot of people at once, and to protect the right of people to have assault rifles IS to protect the “right” to engage in mass murder.

Our country’s ride isn’t going to get any smoother until we change our gun laws. (We aren’t going to magically find the ability find perfect mental health care for all of our citizens, we aren’t able to stop propaganda from all extremist groups, we can’t prevent everyone from wanting to do harm. We can only change the access they have to the tools that make it EASY.)

I’m tired of preaching about violence and guns, but not tired enough to stick my head in the sand and pretend that the 350+ mass shootings in the USA this year didn’t happen. This is the season where we participate with our ancestors in faith in YEARNING for the world to be as God would have it be. Today we are YEARNING for peace, and while peace means a whole lot more than a lack of violence, it has to start there. One commentator on Zechariah’s song of praise (the Benedictus) wrote, “Advent continues, our ruminations go deeper. We wait, watch, wonder if we will ever know peace. Will we find peace in our own souls? Will there be peace on earth?”¹

Friends we live in an age and a country that can cut mountains in two to make the road smooth. We live in an age and a world that has eliminated polio and is about to eliminate malaria. We live in a world where extreme poverty has been cut in HALF over the past 25 years. We live in an age and and a country where an African American man is finishing his second term in office. We live in an age and a county where ROADS cut through MOUNTAINS. Roads can be made smooth. Gun control is not beyond our grasp ( PLEASE call/email/and write to your legislators).Peace is possible.

The road isn’t current easy. It turns out that driving along a smooth road is A LOT easier than building a road and making it safe and easy. I suspect we are called to be the road builders, and God is the one who gives us the strength and vision. Let’s get back to work. Amen

1Randall R. Mixon “Homiletical Perspective on Luke 1:68-79” in Feasting on the Word Year C Volume 1 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009) page 33.

–

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

December 6, 2015

Sermons

“Promise and Hope” based on Jeremiah 33:14-16, 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13

November 29, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

The holidays are supposed to be the highlight of the year – right? In truth they’re much more complicated than that. Holidays are overlaid with expectations and conflicting needs. Buttons can get pushed and desperately needed healing can fail to appear. Additionally, holidays bring up grief from the past, awareness of who is no longer present at the table, and who didn’t care enough to return. Many are lonely in our world, and loneliness can be strongest when happiness is most expected. Or, perhaps, time with family and friends is quite lovely! But afterward is a bit of a let down. Holidays are supposed to be the highlight, and that’s exactly what makes them so complicated. (Please note the existence of the Longest Night service on December 16^th at 7.)

Advent is a strange little occurrence in the midst of the secular “holiday season.” In the Christian liturgical calendar, we are in a season of waiting and hoping. Christmas itself doesn’t show up in the 25^th, and lasts all 12 days to January 5^th, culminating the next day in Epiphany. I have come to love the contrast between the busyness of the secular holiday season and the quietness of Advent. Together, they’re quite fulfilling.

Advent starts a new liturgical year, and we start in the waiting and yearning for God to act that has pervaded humanity for millenia. In Jeremiah, the yearning has emerged from military defeat and exile. Jeremiah preached before, during, and after the siege of Jerusalem. Most of his words are words of warning, of condemnation, and of despair. (After all, he was warning people about the battle they were able to lose.) But in a few passages, he speaks of hope. His hope is one that he does not expect to see in his lifetime, and yet his hope is BIG and profound and still relevant today.

Initially it seems that the promise is that David’s dynasty will not end, that eventually God will raise it back up, and use it to bring justice and goodness back to God’s people. Our passage ends saying, “In those days, Judah will live in safety, and Jerusalem will be secure. The land will known by the name: ‘God is our Justice.” More broadly though, it is a promise of restoration. Translators offer the last line “God is our…” as “justice” at times and “righteousness” at others. I wonder about this word.

There were many interpretations of the exile, I’m pretty sure trying to explain the exile is the theme of the entire Hebrew Bible. None of them came shame free. Either the siege of Jerusalem was lost because the people were unfaithful, or because God was unfaithful, or because God was weak. The generations who lived through the exile and all the generations since have had to struggle to make meaning of the world where the people chosen to be a light on the hill and a blessing to the nations, LOST like any other people. No matter what way it gets explained, there is shame – either shame in action or shame in belief.

Yet the promise is one of calling God Justice or Righteousness. It isn’t just that the people will come home and be safe, it is that their relationship with God will be restored. Perhaps I’m projecting a bit, but in my life, my relationship with God and my relationship with myself have flowed into one another so seamlessly as to be hard to differentiate. For a people struggling with loss and then with shame to return to a relationship of trust in the world with a clarity of God as Justice and Righteousness seems to be a particularly enormous transition.

The words of the prophet Jeremiah set out a guidepost of hope in the midst of destruction. The wholeness they offer seems well tuned into the shame they were responding to. This ancient yearning for the world to be turned right-side-up-again is the start of Advent because it is still our yearning.

We are a people WAITING for fulfillment of promises and for the living of hope. We start the liturgical year in a season of waiting and hope. We believe that God is at work to bring goodness into the world. We believe that the purpose of our existence is to participate in God’s work to bring goodness into the world. And the combination of the two: God’s work with ours is the reason for the hope.

And that brings us to the New Testament reading. These words of Paul are so TRUE! I can feel them in my gut. They sound like my life. I hope they sound like yours. He writes, “How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of you?” I could spend all day making a list of people that make me feel like that! And, most of them I have met through the Church. I’ve met the most amazing people, and been regularly astounded by their love of God and people.

One of my favorite activities for teaching about the wonderfulness of “church” is an exercise on the Fruits of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.) The exercise is simple. I ask whatever students I’m teaching to think of people in their church and match them to the gift they most embody. It turns out, though, to be a little bit hard because people have multiple gifts. In every case that I’ve done the exercise, we’ve left with wonder at the amazing gifts of God in community.

When we look through the lens of hope and gratitude, we find there is much to be excited about! God’s work is not done, but God is at work in the world. God’s people are not perfect, but God’s people are gifted by God in astounding ways.

And, the work that needs to be done is not always difficult. When have you been most grateful for another person recently? Taking time to reflect on the goodness helps it shine more light into the darkness. And it isn’t really all that difficult. It may also be a way of entering more fully into the season of advent:

One of the most frequently used forms of prayer in the Christian Tradition is the process of examen. It is a very simple form of prayer. Generally examen is a repeated process, done every day, or every week, or at some regular interval. After intentionally opening yourself to God, you and God consider the two questions (asked here in a number of ways):

What has been the best part of today? Or, what has been the most life-giving piece of today? Or, how have I best been able to shine forth God’s love today? Or, when did I feel most connected to the Divine today?

What has been the worst part of today? Or, what has been the least life-giving piece of today? Or, how have struggled most to show God’s love today? Or, when did I feel most distanced from the Divine today?

After reviewing the time since the last examen and answering the questions, prayer is offered to thank God for the good and the bad.

For those looking for a spiritual practice to guide them this season, that would be my suggestion. I find it is most helpful if the answers to the questions are either recorded in a journal or shared collectively with loved ones. Sometimes patterns emerge that are only visible if the answers are seen together.

In Biblical history, the exiles would come home, but not the same generation as the ones that left, and not all came home. It was 70 years later, and things were never the same again. But they came home, and rebuilt, and it was good again. And then … frankly, it got bad again. Things were pretty awful during the time of Jesus and got even worse afterward.

Life is complicated. I think maybe more so than average when your “promised land” is one of the crossroads of the world that every empire needs to control in order to expand, but really, it is for everyone. Good comes, and its great. Bad comes and it is terrible. Life ebbs and flows, and it is very rarely static.

I think life with God is like floating softly in warm water. There is gentle current nudging us along, but with the ease of a flick of a wrist we can resist the pull of the current. With one good kick we can define our own way. But we can also let the current guide us, and see where it takes us, trusting in what we can’t yet see. This metaphor is not just for the good and easy times. When the water is soft and gentle and warm, it can be a sweet soak, OR we can choose to live in fear of a stronger current, a cold spring, or a thunderstorm. When the clouds turn dark and rainy, when the wind comes with sorrows, we can give up and drown in the sorrow, OR we can swim with all our might for shore, OR we can keep floating, ride out the storm, and see where we are when the sun comes again.

Perhaps this is one of the meanings of the waters of baptism. Of course, at times, we will all fight the current, worry in the warm water, and swim with all our might until we are exhausted. We’re human. We work like that. But the waters of baptism aren’t a white water river, they aren’t an oceans undertow, they aren’t a churning sea. Faith won’t drown us. Sorrow won’t kill us (although it feels like it can). The waters of baptism are trustworthy waters.

Hope is the gentle current. It’s ok to float.

And dear goodness, during this madness of the holiday season, may the lessons of quiet Advent hope be the ones we rest on. Amen

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

November 29, 2015

Sermons

“Strive for Gratitude” based on Matthew 6:25-33

November 22, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Jesus was a Middle Eastern refugee, according to the Gospel of Matthew. Abraham was a Middle Eastern refugee – specifically a Syrian one- according to the Torah. The entire Exodus narrative is the story of the people who would become ancient Israel as refugees wandering in the desert. And the entirety of the Bible obsesses over welcoming foreigners and offering hospitality to strangers.

According to the UN Refugee Agency, “Globally, one in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum. If this were the population of a country, it would be the world’s 24th biggest. ‘We are witnessing a paradigm change, an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced displacement as well as the response required is now clearly dwarfing anything seen before,’ said UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres.”¹ And, sadly, it appears that many US politicians are responding to terrorist attacks around the world with fear of refugees themselves – instead of with a desire to adapt to the needs of the displaced and to change the realities of our broken world.

It is hard, initially, to talk about “don’t worry about what you’ll eat or drink or wear” when the world has never seen so many displaced people who don’t have access to food or water or clothing. It is ALSO hard to talk about it after having been at our Community Breakfast, and seen the beautiful faces of our guests, who don’t have adequate access to food or water or clothing either.

This is a hard text to preach while acknowledging the realities of the world, but I think it started out that way. The Jesus Seminar, who are pretty picky about what they think Jesus did and didn’t say, wrote this about the passage, “Among the more important things Jesus said are a series of pronouncements on anxieties and fretting. It is possible that we have before us the longest connected discourse that can be directly attributed to Jesus, with the exception of some of the longer narrative parables.”²They also aknowledge the assumed audience, “The string of sayings is addressed to those who are preoccupied with day-to-day existence rather than with political or apocalyptic crises.”³

That is, Jesus was talking to people who were struggling to have enough to eat and telling them not to worry about food. (But he wasn’t talking to refugees.) The aspects of this passage that make it difficult to preach are inherent to it, not a modern challenge of it. Furthermore, it is consistent with how Jesus spoke and what he taught. To go back to the Jesus seminar, and their reasoning for believing in the authenticity of this passage, “these formulations betray the stamp of Jesus’ speech and connect with other sayings stemming from him: congratulations to the hungry (Luke 6:21), petitions for the day’s bread (Matt 6:11), and the certainty that those who ask will receive (Luke 11:10), to cite but a few examples.”⁴ This SOUNDS LIKE Jesus.

Jesus tells hungry people not to worry about bread.

What the heck, Jesus?

I figure there are a few ways to understand this:

We could assume that Jesus doesn’t care about human life and thinks the whole purpose of everything is the spiritual realm and/or access to heaven.
We could assume that God does take care of God’s people, that Jesus’ teaching is true, and that if people are dying of starvation it indicates that God actually doesn’t like them. (Or that they sinned or some other justification for God’s lack of affection.)
We could explain it all away with a conversation about the lack of human capacity to understand Divine Will.

(Please note that I don’t find these options valid enough to bother refuting them. If you need help with that though, let me know, and we can go through them.)

Personally, I’m going to go with the fourth option.

4. Maybe Jesus means it. Maybe paying attention to what you don’t have and worrying over how you’ll get it is a waste of life. Maybe worrying is more of a problem than even hunger and maybe this applies to a lot of aspects of life. Maybe, even, focusing on what you do have and being grateful for it will make more of a difference than having more. (Not to say I’m not still at “What the heck Jesus?” but MAYBE…)

Studies say that we gain more from giving than we do from keeping. In one of my favorites, researchers gave college students $5 and either instructed them to spend it on themselves or on others. They nearly universally went to Starbucks, which would make an interesting study in itself. In any case, in spending the money on themselves, there was a burst of happiness that lasted for a few minutes. The burst of joy that came from spending a gift on others lasted several days.

In concentration camps the power of that phenomenon showed up more powerfully. The people in concentration camps were given starvation level meals. They didn’t have enough to live, and yet the people who choose to share their INSUFFICIENT food with others (usually ones who needed it more) ended up living LONGER. Food, it turns out, is not the most important thing. It may be that hope is. It may be that connection is. It may be that making a contribution to someone else’s well being is. It may be that caring enough to try is. I don’t know. I don’t know how it works, but it does.

And I’m pretty sure that Jesus’ ministry, which happened among people who didn’t have enough to eat anyway, was mostly about freeing people from fear so that they could share and work together and although it doesn’t really make sense if you look at it economically: when a whole group of people who don’t have enough combine their resources, there is MORE than enough. That seems to prove economics wrong.

But I think that may have been the truth that Jesus was getting at. There really is more to life than food and clothing. And, obviously, worrying doesn’t help ONE LITTLE BIT. And, clearly, God wishes for us all to have enough. Yet we know that not everyone does – not every close. And yet, there are also many people in the world who have enough food, water, and clothing and live entirely meaningless lives. I think building a just society and a just world is the responsibility of us as the followers of Jesus (and as people of faith more broadly.) I think we have failed in many ways, just as we have succeeded in many ways. I don’t think everyone is going to have enough to eat – this year. But maybe the year will come when we all will.

In the any case, life IS more than food, and the body IS more than clothing. And there are many, many things to be grateful for. This week I read a book by Joan Chittister and Rowan Williams entitled Uncommon Gratitude: Alleluia For All That Is. One of the chapters is on gratitude and singing alleluia for poverty, which is not something I’d spend a lot of time thinking about. Apparently, Socrates said that the richest person is the one who is content with the least and Epicurus said “Wealth consists in not having great possessions but in having few wants.”⁵ Joan Chittester says:

Poverty brings with it a spiritual vision the lack of which may in the end underlie the final corrosion of this wealthy society in which we live. Poverty stretches us to a vision of life that extends beyond the countinghouse, beyond the glutting of our lives with things. Poverty enables a person to see life in all its dimensions, to taste it in all its sweetness, and to recognize its vacuousness. It enables a person to choose between what is real and what is not about a life lived in midst of plastic and sparkles, of the lasting and the ephemeral, of the dehumanizing and the excessive. It reminds us of what is necessary and what is nothing but fluff, nothing but indulgence, nothing but consumption for the sake of show. Poverty keeps us real.

I do not applaud poverty or recommend it or justify it or minimize its struggles and its cruelty. I do not glorify the “happy poor.” But I do see that a bit less engorgement and a bit more sufficiency in a society long ago surfeited and satiated by the unnecessary could, would, make the whole world richer. ⁶

It isn’t all about feeding physical hunger, because physical satiation isn’t enough for us as humans. We are more. A lack of food is a problem – a justice issue – a thing to try to change. But food isn’t enough. Food, water, and clothes aren’t enough. Maybe Jesus was just telling the truth.

So even now, when the world sometimes feels like it is falling apart at the seams, when so many are hungry, when so little justice is to be found, we still hear Jesus saying, “don’t worry about it!”. What do we do?

We can notice what we have – whatever it is and be grateful. It will multiply the effect of whatever we have – both in our lives and in the lives around us. Gratitude is an antithesis of fear and worry, it is a sister of hospitality and care, it is a way of following Jesus’ commands:

Strive to respond with gratitude; pay attention to the goodness. It all matters. It changes you! Thanks be to God. Amen

___

1“Worldwide displacement hits all-time high as war and persecution increase”http://www.unhcr.org/558193896.html accessed on November 21, 2015.

2Robert W. Funk, Roy W Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Autthentic Words of Jesus (HarperOneUSA, 1993), page 152.

3Funk et al, page 153.

4Funk et al, page 153.

5For the first, I got rid of male language, it is thus not a true quote.

6 Joan Chittister and Rowan Williams entitled Uncommon Gratitude: Alleluia For All That Is(Liturgical Press: Collegeveille, MN, 2010.) page 28.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

November 22, 2015

Sermons

“NOT Worthless”based on 1 Samuel 1:4-20 and 1 Samuel 2:1-10

November 15, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I spent a lot of time thinking about what to say about the terrorist attacks in Paris, before I realized that there were also terrorist attacks made by the same group in Baghdad and Beirut which the news cycle had not taken quite so seriously. Then I realized that there were also deadly natural disasters in Japan and Mexico on Friday. Then I worried that there were likely other tragedies that I didn’t know about. Then I thought of the 200,000 deaths in Syria that have motivated 4 million refugees to leave their homes. Then I remembered that there are lots of refugees NOT from Syria. On Facebook I kept seeing these words, written by a poet named Warsan Shire from Nairobi, Kenya:

“later that night

i held an atlas in my lap

ran my fingers across the whole world

and whispered

where does it hurt?

it answered

everywhere

everywhere.”1

I asked Drew Vickery, who was here this weekend for the CCCYM (Conference Council on Youth Ministries) event what he thought I should say about the attacks on Paris, and after a few hours he got back to be and said, “Nothing. I think you should focus on hope.” #fromthemouthsofteens. I don’t have words to take away the pain of the world, I don’t have words that will stop or transform extremist militants, and I surely don’t have words that will bring any of the lives tragically lost.

The hours I spent reading up on the terrorist group last night brought one imperative sentence to light, “For certain true believers—the kind who long for epic good-versus-evil battles—visions of apocalyptic bloodbaths fulfill a deep psychological need.”2 This clarified my role for today: to offer a form of faith that is not about defining “good” or “evil” but rather about seeking wholeness for ourselves that can encourage others into wholeness. So, here we go…

Hannah is surprisingly resilient. It isn’t that painful things don’t seem to hurt her – they do – a lot! They don’t overcome her. We see it twice in her story. The first thing that we know about her is that she’s barren. Now, people in the ancient world did not think that barrenness COULD be a male problem, but even if they had, Hannah’s husband’s OTHER wife was distinctly not barren. A woman’s value came in her childbearing capacity, and to be barren was to be worthless. To be barren was to be ashamed. Hannah was barren.

And yet…her husband loved her. This is not particularly normal, nor expected for marital relationships at the time. In fact, it looks like it was true in only one of Elkanah’s marriages. He loved Hannah, and he gave her preferential treatment because of it. His words indicate that he doesn’t even care that she’s barren, which I think supports the case that he really loves her and not just her “value” in his life.

This was not sufficient for Hannah. She wanted to have a child. We are completely incapable of determining if this is about her maternal instincts or if it is about a desire not to be in shame, but let’s assume it is some of both. Her husband’s love did not take away her shame, although it may have helped her have resilience to it.

Every year when she had the chance, she went to the house of God and prayed there. We’re told that she asked God to open her womb, and even tried to strike a deal with God about it. This is imperative to her story, she eventually gave birth to the prophet who would anoint the first kings, and it better be clear how faithful his mother was in order to establish his faith.

This is the first place that I see Hannah’s unusual resilience. By most accounting, if a woman’s womb was barren, it was barren because of divine punishment. Yet, as one scholar put it,

“Hannah at once embodies both the patriarchal constructions of her worth and a deep assumption that God is concerned about her. … When Hannah seeks out God’s presence in this state of anguish, her prayer signals that she is aware of a divine concern for those who are questionable worth. She does not come to God with formal petition. She does not come with traditional sacrifice. She comes in loneliness, isolation, and despair. She lays bare all the emotion and pain.”3

She believes that God cares about her, despite her barrenness, despite her shame. She is resilient to her own shame. It doesn’t stop her from seeking the Holy One AND making requests of God and EVEN bargaining with God (which is a dangerous idea). She doesn’t let it stop her, and that indicates that she thinks God might listen to her.

That’s some GOOD theology for a mostly powerless, shamed woman 3000 years ago.

There is a repetition of her resiliency as well. Eli, the priest, is often presented as not knowing a whole lot about God. He isn’t a bad guy, he just hasn’t had much contact with the Divine. So, when Hannah was praying with all her heart, Eli confused this with a drunken stupor, and decided to come up and shame her about that.

She might have slinked away.

But not Hannah. She, a lowly, barren woman corrected him. She is such a delight! She wasn’t mean about it, she correct his assumption. She has NOT been drinking. She explains that she was PRAYING (we don’t know if she gets this out with or without sarcasm in her voice), and she makes a request of him, “Do not regard your servant as a worthless woman, for I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation all this time.” She not only asks favors of God, she asks one of the high priest.

And we should know something is going on by now, because Eli receives her correction and grants her request. Then God does too, and she gives birth to a child and names him Sam-u-el, “God has heard.”

I wish more people were like Hannah, refusing to be put in their place, denying the capacity of anyone else to define their value to the divine. I wish more people took the mantle of shame that other people tried to put on them and simply refused to wear it because they KNOW that they are worthwhile to God.

The Magnificat of Mary which celebrates God’s mighty acts is song that fell from Mary’s lips when she was pregnant with Jesus. It is based strongly on Hannah’s song that she sang to celebrate God’s mighty acts when Hannah was pregnant with Samuel. Hannah’s song, just like Mary’s, focuses on God’s power to care for the poor, the broken, and the vulnerable. It also emphasizes God’s capacity and willingness to bring down the high, the mighty, and the rich. They are songs of celebration of God’s work for the disenfranchised. They are RADICAL claims about God that anyone with a vested interest in the status quo should worry about.

Hannah is the Biblical predecessor to Mary. She’s a big deal, in large part because she knows that God cares about the people that the people don’t care about – including her.

Hannah is a model of shame resilience on the basis of God’s grace, a model we desperately need in modern day Christianity. This week I read Karen McClintock’s book Shame-Less Lives, Grace-Full Congregations, and she had a lot of wisdom to share about shame and grace. Early on in the book she points out that, “We are encouraged by the dominant culture to self-improve rather than self-affirm and to strive for more rather than to be content with what is and satisfied with ourselves. The pervasive and soul-defeating presence of cultural shame leads to perfectionism, addition, and self-hatred.”4 Later, she clarifies that, “Shame is not a course-correcting emotion. While guilt says, “I made a mistake,” shame says, “I am a mistake.‘”5

At two point she offers the words that make SO MUCH sense of the world, “Shame is often the first tool grabbed off the workbench by those entrusted to maintain the status quo,”6 and, “Because shame feels so terrible, we avoid it through the use of blame.”7 But it wasn’t until she said, “You can never be satisfied with yourself if you are constantly striving to be as wise, good, kind, or as generous as God,”8 that I knew she was preaching to me. She continued that point with a quote from Barbara Brown Taylor who said, “I thought that being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was, and it was not until this project failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness.”9

Finally, since this is a quick run through of an excellent book, I want to offer one of her stories:

“I had the opportunity to mentor a clergyperson I’ll call Sam during his first few years as a parish pastor. … To help him integrate his adult self and his ashamed little boy, I had him spend a few weeks between our conversations thinking of himself as ordinary. I encouraged him to ask himself, ‘What would an ordinary person feel right now? What would an ordinary person want, do, say? The exercise provided him with a reflective distance between his idealized self and his ordinary self. Once he accepted his ordinariness, he could balance service with replenishment and encouragement with separation."10

I think Hannah knew how to do that. She was just an ordinary woman, so was Mary, and they knew God to care for ordinary people.

With the possible exception of Jesus, every character in the Bible is visibly and deeply flawed. This clarifies that God works with and through real people, not perfect ones. They called on their actions sometimes, but God doesn’t ask them to “shape up or ship out” when it comes to their flaws. They’re just accepted as they are.

Dear ones, God created you as you are and loves you are as you are. You need not be perfect, you need not be particularly GOOD, you need not be extraordinary. You are enough.

May that knowledge fill the world.

I suspect it will help. Thanks be to God and may God help us ALL. Amen

____

1 Accessed at http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/812310-later-that-night-i-held-an-atlas-in-my-lapon 11-14-15.

2 Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants” in The Atlantic March 2015 Issue. Accessed athttp://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/ on Nov. 14, 2015.

3 Marcia Mount Shoop “Theological Perspective of 1 Samuel 1:4-20” in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 4 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009) page 292.

4 Karen A. McClintock, Shame-Less Lives, Grace-Full Congregations (Herndon, VA: The Alban Intitute, 2012) p. 4.

5 McClintock, 22.

6 McClintock, 52.

7 McClintock, 67.

8 McClintock, 95.

9 McClintock, 101, quoting Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), 218-219.

10 McClintock, 107-109.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

November 15, 2015

Sermons

“Visibly Invisible”based on Mark 10:42

November 11, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I’m going to mention two important dates in my life. The first is Tuesday, January 28, 1986. That is the date of my first class in a course I took during my first year in seminary called “Religion and the Social Process.” It is the ONLY course I ever took where I still remember the introductory comments of one of the three professors who were team teaching the course. Professor Joanna Gillespie looked at us and said, very emphatically, “In this course we are going to give you a lens which will enable you to see structures of oppression.”

That stuck with me. It kind of hit. I had never heard that kind of talk before. Structures of oppression. I had not really thought much about oppression up to that point in my life and I kind of had the vague impression that oppression was what bad people did to the helpless. Oppressors were villains. And of course, I wasn’t an oppressor. I wasn’t racist. I wasn’t sexist. Let me tell you, was I ever in for a wild ride that semester.

In reflecting on this I went back to my notebook from that course. Still have all my notebooks. I was reminded of the phrases and concepts that, as I look back, shaped my thinking and the way I look at the world. Simple things such as an operative definition of oppression:

The use of coercion, force or violence by any holder of power – individual or institution -to constrain others or deny their rights.
Or the idea that social relationships can not be seen except as they are given meaning by the culture.
That there are ways that structure mediates meaning
And that institutions create their own value system

Here is one that I found very powerful.

Social structure operates in three realms; discrimination, segregation and stereotype.

Discrimination – denial of the right to have.

Segregation – denial of the right to belong

Stereotype – denial of the right to be

And all of this organized around a system of in groups and out groups.

Now as the course unfolded through the lectures, readings, group and written assignments it became very clear, to me at least, that my own personal beliefs, attitudes and view of the world came out of this whole structural social-political realm. My belief system was

formed in the context of being a white, middle class, protestant heterosexual.

Fast forward thirteen years. Thursday, May 20, 1999.

That is the day I walked into the administration building of Bare Hill Correctional Facility in Malone, New York, to begin my new job as that prison’s Protestant Chaplain. As I walked into that august institution I very quickly discovered that I might as well have landed on

another planet. It was a different world. And yet it is a world that, in many respects, is a microcosm of the outside world. It is a world where everything is intensified and where the lines of demarcation a brutally sharp.

Talk about a structure that has in groups and out groups! I mean, you can see it as soon as you walk in. Officers in blue, inmates in green, civilians in civilian attire. It’s right there before you. The lines of demarcation were so sharp that as a civilian staff member I was not permitted to wear green or red. Only inmates. The security staff, the guards, in fact all staff, had to be able to visually discriminate population – that is, the incarcerated ones – from non-population. There are many things a prisoner is not permitted to have. And there are groups to which a prisoner is not permitted to belong, namely gangs. And it is the Department that determines what a gang is.

It is a world of organized discrimination, segregation and stereotyping.

Now to be sure, there are sound security reasons for this in most, but by no means all, cases. It wouldn’t be good for prisoners to have guns, knives, drugs, certain metal objects or escape paraphernalia, of course. And gang activities in prison are never good. But the point is all these restrictions are imposed from above.

However, all too often a line gets crossed. And it gets crossed because staff in that setting are cloaked with power. While at Bare Hill I had two clerks who were inmates. One day I called out for one to come into my office for a moment and in about one second he was in front of my desk with a ‘yes sir?’ Boom! There!

Now, in eleven years of teaching prior to that I NEVER had any student respond that way. In 23 years of parenting up to that point I NEVER had a response like that. In 25 years of marriage….well, never mind.

But I call out the clerk’s name and in one second he’s there.

Now this had absolutely nothing to do with me. It is no reflection on how my clerks viewed me. You see, there was something else controlling the situation. It was in the form of something called rule 106.10. Rule 106.10 is in a little booklet that is issued to anyone entering a New York State prison to serve a sentence. It is called Standards of Inmate Behavior. Rule 106.10 is the only rule printed in bold faced upper case letters. Rule 106.10 states AN INMATE SHALL OBEY ALL ORDERS OF DEPARTMENT PERSONNEL PROMPTLY AND WITHOUT ARGUMENT.

It doesn’t say ‘follow,’ doesn’t say ‘comply,’ it says OBEY. Absolutely no wiggle room is given in that rule. And WE, staff, were expected to follow a principle that has a name I’ve always hated, called ‘zero tolerance.’

That simple phrase is a manifestation of immense power. So much so that it gets invoked almost as a religious talisman. I would see signs posted that said such things as “Inmates can not enter without permission of staff.” and the numbers 106.10 would be printed underneath.

Power.

We see the manifestation of it. But there is an invisible component to it. It is visibly invisible.

“You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them.” So Jesus told the disciples in our Gospel reading. I’m only going to deal with that statement.

The phrases ‘lord it over’ and ‘exercise authority over’ are each rendered as a single word in the Greek. ‘Lord it over’ has as its root ‘kyrie’ meaning lord and the ‘exercise authority over’ has the word exousia, meaning authority. And the word ‘archein’ or ruler is in that sentence.

Ruler. Lord. Authority.

I’m going to use those three words as a jumping off point into the work of a remarkable scholar who has given me deeper insight into what I began learning thirty years ago in that wonderful course, my experience as a prison chaplain of fifteen years, and an awful lot of what has been going on in our country, world and yes, in our denomination.

Walter Wink, a New Testament scholar and teacher at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York and who died in 2012, produced a five volume work known collectively as “The Powers” in which he explores the language of power as used in New Testament writings; how the language is used, how the biblical writers conceived of power and the powers and the very real implications that has for us now. Like all good scholars he was not without his critics but I have found his work remarkable.

Those three words, ruler, lord, authority, are power words, part of a language of power that, according to Wink, pervades the New Testament. Other words are kings, rulers, principalities, power, name, wisdom, commission, throne, dominion, lordship. He also observes that the language of power is imprecise, liquid, changeable, and unsystematic. His words. But in spite of this there are clear patterns of usage that can be seen. He also finds that, because they are interchangeable, one word can be used to represent them all.

Now here is one of several kickers. And I’ll quote him directly: “These Powers are both heavenly and earthly, divine and human, spiritual and political, invisible and structured.” That is, invisibly visible.

Now here’s the other kicker; the Powers are both good AND evil.

The processes, definitions and categories that were identified in that course all those years ago could easily be dismissed as mere sociological and psychological reductionism. Explained, or explained away by our modern mindset and world view.

What I have always found remarkable and invigorating is that this work that Wink had done gives us a way to see all of this theologically and biblically. He shows us a way to have a theological and biblical understanding of these processes and categories.

Yes, on one level we can think of kings, rulers, principalities, power, name, wisdom, commission, throne, dominion, lordship, as political structures, social systems and institutions. But he found that there was always something that could not entirely be reduced to those

categories, something immaterial, invisible, spiritual and real.

He argues that the principalities and powers are the inner and outer aspects of any manifestation of power.

The inner aspects are the spirituality of institutions, the inner essence of outer organizations. The outer aspect is seen as political systems, appointed officials, the chair of an organization, laws, all the tangible manifestations which power takes.

Police and law enforcement. Prison guards and prison systems. Chaplains and Administrators in those systems. Governors and governments. Churches and pastors. Bishops. Annual Conferences. Boards of Ordained Ministry.

There is a visible pole, an outer form – be it church, nation, economy – and an invisible pole, the inner spirit, the driving force that animates, legitimates, regulates its physical manifestation in the world. Neither pole is the cause of the other. Both come into existence together and cease to exist together. And the way the inner and outer aspects of a power work, the relationship they have to each other can be complex and is largely unseen. Unless we look for it. I feel it is legitimate for us to think of the spirit of an institution as having a mind of its own that, collectively, may be fundamentally different from the minds of the individuals within that institution, and that the spiritual aspect can influence in unseen ways those who are a part of that institution.

When a particular Power becomes idolatrous, placing itself above God’s purposes for the good of the whole, then that Power becomes demonic.

The church’s task is to unmask this idolatry.

One example that comes to mind is the long, complex and convoluted legal history of corporate personhood. The Citizens United Supreme Court case was but the latest occurrence in a history that goes back centuries. The whole question of what rights are to be afforded a corporate entity has a long, long history. Of course corporations have long had the right to enter into contractual agreements and individuals have long had the right to file suit against corporations, both of which are aspects of personhood. The longstanding question, though, seems to have been just what rights are to be afforded a corporation. ALL the rights of an individual or just some of the rights? To my mind the simple fact that this question has been seriously considered for so many years is an indication that there is an immense and largely unseen power at work here.

When a corporate entity gets to the point that IT’s existence and life is it’s only reason for being and is to be considered of more importance than actual individuals and if it’s life is to be fostered at the expense of individuals – THEN THAT POWER HAS BECOME DEMONIC.

And this is true whether that inner spiritual dimension is that of a corporation, or a law enforcement agency, prison system…

even ideas and ideologies…

And yes, even a religion and it’s concomitant organizations, such denominations.

As I’ve already stated, the church’s task is to unmask this idolatry. Bring it into the light of day. Make it visible. Allow people to see it for what it is.

A warning. You know how you can tell if a person or group is successfully doing this? The more successful anyone is in unmasking a power and shining a light on it, the more angrily and even violently that power will respond.

We’ve seen it in the Occupy Wall Street movement in which the violent response was, at least to me, horrifying. We’ve seen it in Ferguson when the racist basis of law enforcement was called into question.

And yes, we see it in our own denomination – now I’m goin’ from preachin’ to meddlin’ here – we’ve seen it in our own denomination in the recent spate of church trials over the issue of marriage equality. Violence doesn’t have to be physical.

So, that’s it. Our task as part of the Body of Christ is to unmask that which is hidden. To see the invisible in that which is visible. To shine a light and be a light. And to do so without fear. And to do it with love not anger. And yes, to bear the response when it comes.

For are we not the Body of Christ, and do we not have a task to do?

Amen.

Appendix and notes

The references to the course Religion and the Social Process, a course that was taught during the spring semester of my first year at Drew Theological School in Madison, New Jersey, are based on my own recollections and the notes I took during that course.

Our required texts were

The Predicament of the Prosperous, Bruce C. Birch and Larry L. Rasmussen

Beyond Liberation, Carl Ellis

Sexual Violence, Marie Fortune

Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?, Letha Scanzoni and Virginia R. Mollenkott

Hunger for Justice, Jack A. Nelson

Habits of the Heart, Robert N. Bellah, et al.

My very brief discussion of the work of Walter Wink is taken from his three volume work collectively entitled “The Powers.”

Naming the Powers: the Language of Power in the New Testament Fortress Press, 1984

Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence Fortress Press, 1986

Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination Fortress Press, 1992

My comments are primarily from the first volume. For those who are interested, but are hesitant about tackling a fairly monumental three volume work I recommend his 1998 book The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium, originally published by Augsburg and now available in paperback. It is a digest of the third volume with elements of the previous two and at 200 pages considerably shorter than the 784 page total of the three volume work. He also omits almost all the secondary literature references from the larger work.

One important element in Wink’s work, which I did not address, is his coining the term ‘the myth of redemptive violence.’ It is a powerful concept very pertinent to our own time.

This sermon was primarily descriptive as opposed to prescriptive. In addressing any kind of prescriptive approach to the issue we need to be aware of some issues regarding the nature of the Powers, for the Powers are ignorant of God’s plan. I conclude these notes with a fairly extensive quote from Naming the Powers. All emphases are mine.

“The Powers did not know”: seen from the perspective provided by our hypothesis,evangelism and social action are the inner and outer approaches to the same phenomenon of power. I have already described the subversive character of the early church’s refusal to worship the imperial genius and its recourse instead to prayer. Many modern Christians have unfortunately understood injustice in simply materialistic terms and have not recognized the need to “convert” people from the spirituality that binds them to a particular material expression of power. It is not enough merely to change social structures. People are not simply determined by the material forces that impinge on them. They are also the victims of the very spirituality that the material means of production and socialization have fostered, even as these material means are themselves the spin-off of a particular spirituality. In a new structure people will continue to behave on the basis of the old spirituality, as they have to varying degrees in every communist regime, unless not only the structure but also their own psyches are reorganized.

Evangelism is always (Wink’s emphasis) a form of social action. It is an indispensable component of any new “world” Unfortunately, Christian evangelism has all too often been wedded to a politics of the status quo and merely serves to relieve distress by displacing hope to an afterlife and ignoring the causes of oppression. The repugnance with which most liberal Christians regard evangelism betrays their own failure to discern that all liberation involves conversion. Whenever evangelism is carried out in full awareness of the Powers, whether in confronting those in power or liberating those crushed by it, proclaiming the sovereignty of Christ is by that very act a critique of injustice and idolatry. And as the churches of South Korea and Brazil and Chile and around the world have learned, such evangelism will inevitably spark persecution. In sum structural change is not enough; the heart and soul must also be freed, forgiven, energized, given focus, reunited with their Source.

Walter Wink

Naming the Powers

Pages 116-117

___

–

Rev. James Sprenger

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

October 18, 2015

Uncategorized

Webcast: Northeastern Jurisdiction Global Connection Plan

November 9, 2015
by Administrator

Webcast: Northeastern Jurisdiction Global Connection Plan

If you wanted to know more about the Global Connection Plan (created by the Northeastern Jurisdiction of the UMC’s Global Structure Task Force, on which Sara sat) you can watch it here.

Sermons

“Generous Gifts of Poor Women” based on Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17…

November 8, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Usually, the educated elite of a society receive more praise an attention than society’s impoverished widows, but usually doesn’t apply to the Bible. The scribes were religious scholars, but they were also more. By Jesus’ day, the Temple high priest was appointed by Rome and the priests and scribes were benefiting from the Empire’s system of taking the wealth of the poor and giving it to the already wealthy. Many of them, I suspect, meant well. They thought they were keeping the peace. They were doing the best they could with what they had. But they were participating in a system of oppression.

Rodger Nishioka is a contributor to Feasting on the Word, and a professor of Christian Education at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, GA. He writes regarding the gospel:

Together, these two sections read as a lament for and an indictment upon any religious system that results in a poor widow giving all she has so the system’s leaders may continue to live lives of wealth and comfort. The attack is not on Jewish religious practice. The attack is on any religious practice that masks egotism and greed. The scribes are like leeches on the faithful, benefiting from a religious system that allows poor widows to sacrifice what little they have.¹

The little narrative is ripe for interpretation, despite its brevity. As a child I always imagined this widow to be an old woman, a connotation associated with widowhood that often makes life very hard for young women who are widows. But many artists have portrayed this scene, and more often then not they show her as young, sometimes even holding a baby. Then, instead of an older woman sacrificing her own food, that suggests a young mother sacrificing her family’s food.

We don’t know her age, we do know that the “collection plates” of the temple were metal. Since all money was coins, and the bigger coins were worth more, this particular set up insured that people could HEAR how large the donations were. This meant that the big givers got big praise, and the small givers – got shamed.

Jesus upset that system. He didn’t sit there praising the big givers for their big gifts. He noticed the woman giving small gift, a shameful gift, a gift so small it would be tempting not to show up and give it, and he noticed. He noticed that her gift was big IN COMPARISON to what she had, and that the other gifts had been small IN COMPARISION. He took the person most likely to be ignored, disregarded, unimportant, and shamed (because, after all, the MAN of the family should have been giving the gift), and he praised HER. He saw.

Poverty can make people feel invisible. Being a woman in a patriarchy can feel invisible. Being a widow without support can easily feel invisible. But Jesus saw her in the midst of all that was going on in the temple. And he used her as an example of abundant giving.

The Torah sets up a system that is meant to care for widows, orphans and foreigners AND for the Levites who cared for the religious well being of the community. The Levites didn’t get a portion of the land allotted to them. Instead, one of the purposes of tithes was to feed them. They took care of the cultic rituals, and the rest of the tribes took care of them. They didn’t get all of the tithes though, because some of them went back to people’s hometowns to throw feasts for EVERYONE, which was one of the ways of feeding widows, orphans, and foreigners. Widows, orphans, and foreigners were cared for in other ways as well: there were laws about leaving the edges of fields and the second pickings for those who had no land, there was an expectation of levirate marriage which tried to keep family lines alive and widows cared for, and there were laws against the sale of family property and against interest which meant that poverty could exist but didn’t become an inherently downward spiral.

The Torah set up a system to care for the vulnerable AND to allow a set aside group of people to be able to devote themselves to religious practice by being given gifts by the rest. The issue in this passage is that those devoted to religious practice are not simply surviving, they’re thriving, and they’re doing it by taking away the livelihoods of the vulnerable. And Jesus was NOT happy.

The widow may have been paying her expected tithe to the Temple, or she may have been giving of her own expectations of herself. We aren’t told that, but we are told that she has given all that she has to the Temple. What sort of religious organization takes the last money of a poor widow?

Is this story told to praise the widow or to condemn the Temple? The widow’s generous gift is an indictment of the Temple system, and an even bigger one in the context of the scribe’s greed and egotism. Perhaps it is OK to take a poor widow’s last coins, because there is a human need to GIVE, and because contributing to something larger than ourselves matters, and because a person has a right to give whether they have a lot or a little. But it isn’t OK to take a poor widow’s last coins if the system in place isn’t going to take care of the widow. The system is making the clergy wealthy at the expense of the already poor. Or, to make it more simple, the Temple was functioning to take the meager wealth of the poor and redistribute it to the rich. No wonder Jesus was angry.

The widow gives an extraordinary gift that the Temple is not worthy to receive. A friend of mine asked a great question this week: what would it take to make the Temple worthy of such a gift, and what would it take to make our churches worthy of such gifts? That is worth pondering.

The poor widow, however, is not the only generous widow in our scriptures today. We also have Ruth and Naomi. This is a story worth knowing, here is a brief summary of the first two chapters:

Naomi and her husband and two sons left the holy land of Israel to live in in the hated neighboring country of Moab because of a famine. The famine lasted a long time, and both sons grew up and married Moabite women. Then both sons and Naomi’s husband died. She decided it was time to go back to Israel, to live as poor widow on other people’s generosity. As was expected at the time, her daughters in law went with her, but before they had gone far she turned to them and freed them from their bond to her. Custom said they were to stay with the family they married into. She urged them back to their own mothers to start their lives anew. One went, the other was Ruth, who pledged her life in a vow of commitment to Naomi’s. When they get back to Naomi’s village Ruth goes to glean the leftovers of the harvest and the owner of the fields instructs her to be treated with kindness.

That brings us up to the part of the story we read today, which is HIGHLY suggestive in a sexual way. As one scholar put it, “The word for ‘lie down’ in Hebrew often implies sexual intercourse. Moreover, feet are used as euphemism for genitalia in the Bible. Though the word translated as ‘feet’ in this passage is not the usual term, Naomi’s instruction to ‘uncover’ the lower extremities of Boaz is provocative. That this encounter happens at night makes the meeting even more suggestive.”² I generally enjoy it when I’m in on the joke, and I know it when the Bible is making sexual innuendos.

This, however, is not one of those times. The story is thought to end well. Ruth and Naomi are cared for by Boaz, Naomi’s line continues, and eventually King David well be born. Theologically it is magnificent, since the Israelites and Moabites were historic enemies and the Israelites were often vehemently anti-marriage with foreigners. The mere existence of this story is pretty remarkable. You’d think they wouldn’t want to say that their most beloved (no, I don’t know why) king was the great-grandson of Moabite woman, but they DO. And it seems to suggest that God’s ways are bigger than human ways, and God’s inclusion extends to even one’s enemies.

AND YET, I’m a really enormously big fan of the concept of sexual consent, and I’m not sure that Ruth had any of that in this story. I grant that she is said to have gone willingly to Boaz, but her economic circumstances called for desperate measures and she was willing to take them in order to ensure that both she and Naomi would survive. Is it consent when you and your loved one(s) would die if you didn’t? Was Naomi appropriate and wise in finding a way forward, or did she use Ruth’s young and sensually pleasing body for their gain? Who actually had power in this situation and why?

In some ways, and I don’t like of the the ways, holding the Bible up to the standard of sexual consent is unreasonable. Women didn’t often have the power to say “no,” and if you can’t say “no,” then your “yes” doesn’t count. But when a whole society fails to give women the right to say “no” then it becomes odd to call out the lack of consent in any particular story. But I’m doing it anyway, because I think it is wrong every single time.

At best, in this story, Ruth and Naomi choose to use Ruth’s sexual capacity to gain the means of survival. It is a gift much like the widow’s mite – one that is generous in the extreme and an indictment when it is necessary that it be given. Ruth is not alone, by any means, in the history of women, in becoming so poor that they only thing they have left to use towards survival is their own bodies. This is a story with nearly universal undertones, at least in market economies. It is proof yet again that the Bible is not naive about humanity, including the struggles of very poor women. At the same time, every retelling of this story should be a condemnation the society in which it happens.

The story provides evidence that Boaz was a very honorable man, likely even a good man. I like to think that despite all that happened out of necessity that Ruth may even have been quite happy with him, but that’s likely just wishful thinking. Ruth gave what she had, both for herself and for the woman dependent on her and unable to provide anything for herself.

Some generosity is too much.

One poor widow gave her last coins to the Temple.

Another poor widow gave her sexual capacity for the sake of male protection and therefore survival.

May these stop being common stories.

May we build a religious system that is worthy of the widow’s mite.

May we build a world where sex is ONLY mutual, consensual, and NEVER necessary for survival.

May we hear the stories of women and men who have given such gifts, and honor them.

And when we receive gifts of excessive generosity (of any size or type) may our receiving honor the givers. May God help us. Amen

____

1 Rodger Y Nishioka “Pastoral Perspective on Mark 12:38-44” in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 4 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009), page 286.

2 Frank M. Yamada “Exegetical Perspective on Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17” in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 4 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009), page 269.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

November 8, 2015

Sermons

“Jesus Wept” based on Revelation 21:1-6a and John 11:32-44

November 1, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

It has been a while since I’ve stood in the pulpit to preach. Over the past three weeks, this space has been filled by profound and interesting men, whose willingness to share of themselves gave me space to focus myself elsewhere. I went on vacation. I soaked up the goodness of people I love, who make me whole, and it was grand.

Over the course of my adulthood I’ve used my vacation time to do two things: to see people I love, and to ski. The skiing has always happened with people I love, which makes winter vacation trips all the sweeter. I’m told that there are people who go vacations to do other things – like sit on a beach, or meet a new city, or hike an amazing part of the world that they’ve never hiked before. Those options have always seemed wonderful to me, but they have never become a priority because I have too many people I love and want to see, and they are always a bigger draw than anything else could be. There are a lot of people I love that I wish I had more time with – and they’re all over!

This week I came across an article that substantiated my vacationing choices. It is entitled, “How Our Housing Choices Make Adult Friendships More Difficult”¹ and it was a response piece to an article in the Atlantic entitled, “How Friendships Change in Adulthood.”² Both pieces were both interesting, discussing the importance of friendship to happiness and the challenges of making and maintaining friendships during adulthood. The Atlantic article discussed the challenges related to work and family – the demands of life that take away the time for friendship.

The housing article added some important perspective on American society, and what we think is normal. It points out that making close friends comes down to “ proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other.”³ Or to put it more succinctly, “The key ingredient for the formation of friendships is repeated spontaneous contact.”⁴ For many of us, the way we life doesn’t make a lot of space for that. Cars don’t help. Walkable neighborhoods do help, but not everyone lives in them. Houses don’t necessarily help! People are more likely to run into each other in apartments or in intentional co-housing. (The articles points out that this explains why so many people make such important friendships in college.) That is, we don’t just run into all that many people!

Interestingly, whenever I am walking around in Schenectady, I do run into people I know. Because of poverty levels in Schenectady, many people are not isolated by cars (they don’t have them) or housing (it is intermingled). It strikes me as strange that as people move up the socio-economic ladder in our society, they end up being more isolated from others. This seems to support the article’s argument that what we think of as normal in the USA isn’t normal and likely isn’t good! Why can’t we build a society where people interact AND have food security? The truth is we can, but we have to dream it.

The article, which was really advocating for thinking about housing life differently, much like my college friends and I always dreamed, with extended community in co-housing, running into each other in shared spaces, had one passing line that I couldn’t let go of. It was arguing about how isolated people are and said, “Say you’re a family with children and you don’t regularly attend church (as is increasingly common). There are basically two ways to have regular, spontaneous encounters with people. Both are rare in America.” (The two ways are “walkshed” neighborhoods and intentional co-housing.)

But did you hear it? If you don’t regularly attend church, then you don’t have the opportunity to meet people, run into them spontaneously, get to to know them slowly over time, and become friends. But, if you do attend church, that’s one of the benefits. I sort of love it when the value of church IS seen in society, and that is in fact one of the greatest values.

Today is All Saints Day. While we use it as a ritual of remembrance for all of our loved ones, and that is beautiful and important, there is a nuance to it that we often ignore. All Saints started as a way to remember the martyrs of church, and is formally a way to remember all Christians both past and present. Most specifically, today is the day to remember the members of our church family who have passed away in the past year and add them to the collective cloud of witnesses who came before us. The great cloud of witnesses dreamed and shaped our community and entrusted it to us, hoping that we will one day pass it on again. In a celebration of life, we thank God for the life of an individual person. On All Saints day we thank God for all the saints, and the collective gifts they’ve given us.

And THAT is why I’m waxing poetic about friendship today. We are formed by each other, in community, and sometimes the lines of connection and intersection are invisible to us. In my time here I’ve heard stories of people I’ve never met, and yet their lives have shaped mine. Friendships are most important to our happiness and our wholeness, they shape our lives. Most church relationships are friendships.

The honored dead whose names we will read today are people who shaped our lives, whether they were part of this church or not. And by shaping us, they’ve guided us not only into who we are but also in how we understand God and Love. In the Gospel lesson today, Jesus weeps. Trivia fans be aware, in the KJV, this was the shortest verse in the Bible. Theologians have argued since this story stated getting told about why he wept, but I think most of them have been wrong. They have messed up theories about him weeping is just a ploy, or annoyance at the crowd.

I think Jesus wept because his friend was dead.

This is not a particularly difficult interpretation for me to come to. Jesus cared about Lazarus. He was sad that he was dead, and he was also sad that Mary and Martha were hurting, and being present to his own grief and theirs led to tears. Over the centuries this interpretation has been avoided like the plague because it implies that Jesus may not have been: all-knowing, stoic, or immune to emotion. I’m cool with all those issues. I’d rather understand Jesus to be a man who cried when terribly sad things happened.

In our Revelation passage, the acts of creation which start the Bible and continue thematically through it, come to their narrative conclusion. God acts in creation again, this time a creation that exists without chaos, without death, without grief, and WITH the fullness of the Divine presence in all places and at all times. It is a vision of comfort and consolation that has held up to the passing of the ages. As one scholar put it, “It is a vision of the church at the end of time, and, because it partakes of the eternal, it is present and available to us now.”⁵

That is, in our relationships of love – in our families, in our friendships, in our church family- we get a glimpse of what it is to have the fullness of God among us. The vision of Revelation is one where we’d not only be intimately connected to God, but we also wouldn’t lose each other anymore.

Somehow, and we all understand the how differently, God keeps us connected to each other, even beyond the seemingly firm lines of death. God is the connector, we are connected, and connection is what makes life so wonderful. So thanks be to God – for those we love and have lost, for those we love and have not lost, and for God’s own self. Thanks be to God for friendships – past, present and future. May we continue to learn to give them energy so they can give us life. Amen

____

1 http://www.vox.com/2015/10/28/9622920/housing-adult-friendship
2 http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/how-friendships-change-over-time-in-adulthood/411466/
3 David Roberts “How Housing Choices Make Adult Friendships More Difficult” published in Vox Policy and Politics accessed athttp://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/how-friendships-change-over-time-in-adulthood/411466/ on Oct. 31, 2015.
4 Ibid.
5 Ginger Grab, “Homiletical Perspective of Revelation 22:1-6a” in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 4 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009) page 233.
–

Rev. Sara E. BaronFirst United Methodist Church of Schenectady603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

November 1, 2015 – All Saints