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July 8, 2024
by Sara Baron

“Shared Burdens, Shared Resources” based on 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13 and James 5:1-6

When we gather at the communion table, we are reminded time and time again that we are united by sharing from one loaf, by receiving from one cup. We receive the body of Christ to be the Body of Christ. We TOGETHER do the work of Christ in the world, we are fed together so we can act together.

We also talk a lot in the church about being church family, it happens enough that it becomes a struggle in hymn selection! I love kinship language, but I want us to use the more inclusive “siblings” and instead of the far more common “brothers and sisters.” Not that brothers and sisters is bad language, its good, its just not BEST.

Our Biblical passages today are also about being united in Christ, and becoming family to one another, although they come at it from a slightly different angle.

As we heard in Rev. Dr. Theoharis’s essay, the often abused quote “He who does not work shall not eat” is not about condemning the poor and declaring it a person’s own fault they live in poverty. Instead, 2 Thessalonians calls out the rich who aren’t doing their fair share to care for the community. Because, those who can do so have been resting on their wealth without worrying about those who are starving. They are called on to share the burdens of the community, and to share the resources they all have.

Get up, the writer implores. The writer isn’t calling everyone to labor in the fields, but he is calling everyone to contribute.

Sometimes, I find my internal voices telling me that only some work counts… and somehow the work that “counts” is NEVER the work I’ve been getting done. That’s my own internal voices not God 😉

The writer is urging followers of Christ to interdependence. If one person has enough not to work, but their sibling in Christ does not, then the work is not done until the sibling can eat too!

John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movements, grew up in poverty as a preacher’s kid and became a preacher. He was an unusually good preacher though, enough so that his sermons were printed and sold, and made a lot of money. John Wesley was convinced by his understanding of God and the Bible that his wealth was not his own, and so he gave it away. He shared what he had with those who were struggling the most. One winter, when he was 80 years old, the cold was especially bad and the poor were struggling immensely. John Wesley begged on the streets of London – not for himself but for those who were impoverished – the ones he’d already given his own wealth to.

I’m pretty sure that fits with God’s vision.

You may have noticed that as much as 2 Thessalonians pushes on the rich, James is harsher. James is vicious against the rich. (For some of us, this is pretty squirmy stuff. I’m not going to resolve that reality, but I am acknowledging it. It turns out following Jesus is hard.)

James says that those who are rich now will suffer later. All their wealth will rot and rust, and they’ll be held accountable for the ways their wealth was accumulated. “The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts.” James warns those who live in luxury build on the labor of others that they are culpable for the harm done to the others.

These passages are saying the same thing. We are responsible for each other. We are community, kin, interconnected. And if we treat others unfairly, that’s on us. If we are in community, we need to work for everyone’s well being. Following Jesus isn’t about getting comfortable or “taking care of number 1.” It is about expanding our hearts and our lives until we are able to truly “love our neighbors as ourselves.”

We now live in a world with fairly permeable boundaries. Where once it was easy to think of a neighbor as a person in one’s village or neighborhood, there are many ways we live in a global village now, and the needs of neighbors are immense and overwhelming. The degree of concentrated wealth in this world is also immense and overwhelming.

We are mean to help each other, inter-personally, and even when it is hard.

I do want to say that it is possible for a society to organize itself in DIFFERENT ways than the ones we’ve chosen. It is possible to have tax codes that move wealth down rather than up. It is possible to house all the people in our country, and in our world. It is possible to feed people healthy and delicious food. It is possible to take care of everyone. It isn’t even that hard. What isn’t possible is to take care of everyone while consolidating all the resources at the top. It can’t be done. This one can’t be both and. We can share and take care of each other or we can let a few people have ridiculous wealth. But the ridiculousness of the wealth at the top right now – it makes it impossible to care for the many.

The writers of the New Testament lived in a world like the one we live in. Jesus and James at least had very little power in that system. They all called on the rich to see and care about the poor, to notice how they’re treated, to take responsibility for not trampling on the poor.

Don’t trample each other, God says! Also, seek the goodness that comes in a society that cares for all of God’s beloveds.

And also, eat this bread, drink this cup – they united us, and that unity is a holy and wonderful gift. (And challenge.) Amen

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

July 7, 2024

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March 17, 2024
by Sara Baron

“Hope for Just Justice" based on Ezekiel 22:23-29 and Deuteronomy 16:18-20

Our two scripture readings today clarify for me that I prefer to hear the dreams of God in the positive instead of the negative. Deuteronomy lays out how a just society should be ordered, in this case by clarifying what a just justice system looks like. Ezekiel points out that the justice of God has not been fulfilled and describes what things are like instead. And, boy, I like the Deuteronomy reading a lot better. But, it does seem fair to point that they’re making the same point in different ways.

The ways that the Bible, especially the Torah in the Hebrew Bible, obsesses over just justice, tends to surprise me a bit. It pushes back on some assumptions I have about how complicated the society of ancient Israel was – and makes it clear that ancient Israel was a complex and REAL human society. It wasn’t some dream state, or .. I don’t, a part of such early history that the hurts of society weren’t present yet. (My assumptions are really off and need some reflection.)

Part of the ancient Israelite narrative was that they were people who had been freed from slavery in Egypt. The scholarship I respect the most suggests that those who were actually in Egypt and freed may well have been a very small number, but their story resonated with others and was taken on as an identity narrative – first by nomadic people in the desert and later by some of the people in the land they would come to call the Promised Land and the culminating group of people who understood themselves to be ancient Israel were the people who identified with this story of God freeing them from slavery.

What feels important about that is that ancient Israel was thus a place that knew how worldly systems of domination worked. Right? Egypt was a monarchy with slavery and forced labor and money flowing from the bottom to the top. Those who were listening to God and dreaming a new society were wanting to prevent the same thing from happening again. Those same scholars also suggest that the hills of Judea were largely populated by people who had exited the early societies in both the Fertile Crescent and Egypt, which suggests they were the ones who weren’t successful in those systems, who left because they thought they could do better on their own than in a society that was pressing down on them. This may be why the “God freed us from slavery” narrative resonated so well.

The first 5 books of the Bible create shared identity and a shared dream, the idea of creating a society the way God wants it to be. We know that they were written down AFTER the destruction of the Temple in 587-586 BCE and the biases of those times impact what how things were written down, including a yearning to have listened better so as not to be in that situation. Ezekiel is a prophet OF the exile, he was called while in exile in Babylon, and spoke his prophetic words from Babylon. Which gives us the context that it is from another domination system – Babylon – that todays words came into being. (Although there were more edits later, of course.)

Anyway, Deuteronomy makes these points about what justice should look that feel so ON POINT that it is hard to remember they were written down 2.5 millennia ago. Judges need to be everywhere – an assumption there will always be disputes that need an impartial third party to help. Judges should render JUST decisions. Judges should not distort justice. Judges should not show partiality. Judges should not accept bribes ( ah. hem.) Bribes blind wisdom and prevent right judgement. Justice and only justice must be the work of those who judge – and their work is imperative to making it possible to live in the land in right relationship with God and each other.

So, apparently all groups of humans have disagreements and need trustworthy ways of finding just solutions AND being able to offer that justice to people WITHOUT BIAS based on power or wealth is one of the fundamental pieces to creating not only a functional society, but a society where people find it easiest to connect with God.

Well, Deuteronomy, no lies are found there.

Ezekiel goes a little further, condemning all the leaders for the lack of justices that the vulnerable experience: the upper class is violent towards the poor; the clergy enable the wealthy to skip the sabbath in order to seek more wealth; the officials destroy lives for their own gain; and the prophets claim it is all OK. The result, then is oppression of the poor and needy, and the immigrants being mistreated without having any capacity to seek justice.

Um. Wouldn’t it be super cool if the prophet of the exile who remembers the destruction his society and reflects on what issues might have brought down his beloved nation sounded like he was talking about a really, really different place than the one we live in??

Yep, I’d prefer for Ezekiel not to resonate and Deuteronomy to be self-evidently the way things already are.

And… here we are anyway.

I do not wish to make a comprehensive list of all the ways our justice system lacks justice, because I’m told people don’t like multi-day sermons (🤷🏻‍♀️), but one of the end results of our system is that we have 2.3 million people incarcerated in the USA, which is about 0.7% of our population. Therefore, While the United States represents about 4.2 percent of the world’s population, it houses around 20 percent of the world’s prisoners.1 And, as we know, the prison population is incredibly disproportionate by race, and those who are imprisoned are the people in the US who lack the right not to be in slavery, and many of the jails and prisons in the US are run by for-profit industries who are making money both on the labor of the inmates and on the fees they charge to offer sub-human care to the inmates.

Maybe I am more open to how Ezekiel expresses concerns than I thought I was! 😉

As is often the case, I think I’ve managed to preach us firmly into despair, and now we get to move together towards hope. Because of being part of the church, I was introduced early on to the concepts of restorative justice and how they differ from punitive justice. Even knowing this has been life-changing. Our current, imperfect, Social Principles say:

In the love of Christ, who came to save those who are lost and vulnerable, we urge the creation of a genuinely new system for the care and restoration of victims, offenders, criminal justice officials, and the community as a whole. Restorative justice grows out of biblical authority, which emphasizes a right relationship with God, self, and community. When such relationships are violated or broken through crime, opportunities are created to make things right.

Most criminal justice systems around the world are retributive. These retributive justice systems profess to hold the offender accountable to the state and use punishment as the equalizing tool for accountability. In contrast, restorative justice seeks to hold the offender accountable to the victimized person, and to the disrupted community. Through God’s transforming power, restorative justice seeks to repair the damage, right the wrong, and bring healing to all involved, including the victim, the offender, the families, and the community. The Church is transformed when it responds to the claims of discipleship by becoming an agent of healing and systemic change.

And this isn’t just TALK in the church. The United Methodist Church has standards for companies it will and will not invest in, including in our clergy pension programs, and companies that make profits from private prisons are on our DO NOT invest list. If you were wondering, this church holds the same policy. United Women in Faith have a specific focus on stopping the school to prison pipeline. The General Board of Church and Society advocates on our behalf in Washington for criminal justice reform. There is a program called “Strengthening the Black Church for the 21st Century” that aims at strengthening predominately Black congregations in mission and ministry, and one of their foci is on ending mass incarceration. More of my education on these concerns has happened here in this church, in the Intersectional Justice Book Club, and in conversations with you wise people. We also have in our midst a United Methodist Home Missioner whose job is to offer family law services to inmates in NYS prisons. Just by being part of the UMC our local church is part of changing what is into what should be. That’s a big part of why our connection matters.

I think a lot about being the tragic gap – the place where you see both how things are and how things should be and are vulnerable to the pain that results from the distance between them. I believe the tragic gap is a holy and important place to be, but NOT because we need to be left in despair. Rather because change can’t happen unless we see with clarity what is AND see with clarity what can be. Being vulnerably in the tragic gap is a way to be open to God’s creative work within us. For most of us, the work to make the justice system more just isn’t our primary work – but here is the amazing thing! By being in the church and doing our own primary work, we enable others TO DO that work. The goal of the Body of Christ is to work towards justice, but no one person is meant to do all the pieces. Thank God for all who are seeking restorative justice, criminal justice reform, working on behalf of those incarcerated, for those seeking the well-being of friends and family in prison, and thank God for those who are living in prison and finding ways to seek justice and live love despite it all.

Things aren’t as they should be, but that’s not a reason to lose hope. God and good people are working on change, and change will come. On this, and on many other ways justice is lacking. Thanks be to God. Amen

1 https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/prisoners-2022-statistical-tables

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

March 17, 2024

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February 18, 2024
by Sara Baron

“Wailing as a Means to Hope” based on Amos 5:10-15 and Jeremiah 31:15-17

I’ve committed to a theme of hope in the midst of despair this Lent, because it is a topic I sense we all desperately need. You can be forgiven for thinking that thus far in worship readings we’ve done the despair part better than the hope part. Our “We Cry Justice” reading came from the section entitled “Struggle and Lament” and an essay entitled, “You Must Let Us Wail” and it was fabulously matched with Amos bemoaning the poor being trampled and Jeremiah offering us the famous words, “Rachel is weeping for her children.”

What excellent summaries of exactly the states of the world that result in a sense of being hopeless and overwhelmed. Dismay, lament, injustice, wailing, and despair.

Amos and Jeremiah are prophets, and that means they’re doing something different with the despair than we might expect. Truthfully, they’re USING it. They’re using it to motivate people, to create change. Amos looks around, sees the messes, points them out, and then calls people to live differently. We hear it within our passage today:

Seek good and not evil,
   that you may live;
and so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you,
   just as you have said.
Hate evil and love good,
   and establish justice in the gate;
it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts,
   will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.

Those two verses show up in the midst of a looooooooong lament, but they’re also THE POINT. “Do life differently, don’t keep up this system of things being unjust.” And, indeed, Amos is lamenting the unjust ways society is siphoning wealth from the poor to the rich. Many modern prophet smake similar points in similar ways. But perhaps we’re not hearing the point within the lament – the POINT is to create change.

Jeremiah is doing a similar thing but on a larger scale. Jeremiah is the prophet of the exile: he saw where things would land if nothing changed, he saw destruction happening, he saw the depth of despair, and then afterwards he points out that not all hope is lost. His is a tough book, but the hope in it is real. We may also be trained to hear more easily, “Rachel is weeping for her children” than the lines that follow it, “They shall come back, there is hope for your future.” Jeremiah isn’t speaking an easy or light hope, he is speaking hope into the darkest of times – and that hope was just as real as his concerns about the exile had been.

In Jeremiah’s writing, despair is named, and met with hope, despite it all.

Interestingly, Stephen Pavey seems to be doing a similar thing. He is speaking clearly about the injustices of our day, but he isn’t doing it to bring hopelessness. He says, “Callie and Martin, like Amos, are speaking for God using the poetry and prophecy of lament. They are calling for justice to be worked out and lived out in order to build a different world, a beloved community.”1

There is a funny truth here: prophets don’t lament things being the way they are to induce hopelessness and lead people to shut down because they’re overwhelmed. Prophets name injustice because they believe JUSTICE is possible. Prophets name systemic greed because they believe an equitable distribution of resources is possible. Prophets name their concern about “how things are going” because they have hope it can get turned around.

Why isn’t this more obvious? Why does this seem worth mentioning, even?

I think dear ones, because we now live lives saturated in “news” that can sound a little bit like prophecy, but isn’t. Headlines lament poisoned water, but “the news” is an industry committed to turning a profit from exposing bad news. There may be plenty of people in the industry who do so hoping it will motivate change, but that isn’t the industry’s first concern. And, we’d probably be OK if there were just headlines about poisoned water. We can work on that! But there are also headlines about… wars, possible genocides, famines, coups, floods, fires, earthquakes, ELECTIONS, hospital mergers, lack of nursing home staffing, COVID learning declines, long COVID, increasing poverty rates, lack of housing for migrants, use of solitary confinement despite it being banned…

What else have you read THIS WEEK?

The news can sound like a prophet, but it isn’t one.

Because a prophet shares concerns about injustice to motivate changes towards God’s visions of justice. NOT to make money.

Now, I’m really not trying to pick on the news industry (it is having a hard enough time), nor discourage you from seeking to be informed (which sometimes can feel like a form of power in an otherwise powerless existence). Rather, I’m wanting to remind us all that a constant intake of bad news isn’t something we’re OBLIGATED to engage in, and knowing doesn’t ACTUALLY create change. Especially if we’re already overwhelmed, especially if we’re worried about our own lives of that of one of our loved ones. The world is vast and complicated and none of us are ever going to know everything, and it is definitely OK to fast from the news when it leads you to hopelessness. (Lenten Spiritual practice I’d recommend, even.)

Because the news isn’t doing the work of the prophets. It isn’t rooted in hope.

The prophets do that work and God still calls them to do it. Interestingly, the prophets sometimes get overwhelmed by despair too, but somehow they find their way through Somehow the urging of God to call for something BETTER than what is, motivates them to move beyond what’s wrong and into what could be. When we seek out information, maybe it matters a little bit why the story is being told – and why it is being listened to. None of us can respond to the hundreds of concerns we can read about every day, so it is worth paying attention to if in-taking them is live-giving or life-draining. I do not believe God needs us to know about one more justice issue we can’t tackle if knowing it drains us from hope.

There is, however, something fundamentally GOOD about injustice being named – by prophets and even by the news. The piece of hope is that people will respond “this isn’t as it should be.” Now, again, if that’s just a way to make some money, meh. But STILL, just naming that things being broken isn’t as God wants them to be MATTERS.

The act of lament is the act of seeing what is broken and wishing for it to be healed.

Sometimes, dear ones, when we feel hopeless, I think we’re really engaging in the sacred act of lament. And we need not berate ourselves for engaging in sacred actions, even if they’re hard.

What we may need to guard against though, is being so overwhelmed that we move into helplessness. And that, beloveds of God, I sometimes fear is one of the impacts of the 24 hour news cycle compounded by social media. They move us into learned helplessness. Because we hear about wars fought far away, and children being made into orphans, and we can’t actually DO anything about it – and we hear about … and we can’t do anything about it, and we hear about… and we can’t do anything about it, and we start to learn that we can’t do ANYTHING.

Which is simply not true.

We can’t create peace in the Middle East, but we can reach out to our neighbors in the Capital Region who are Muslim and Jewish and remind them with our words and actions they are seen and loved. That matters in the face of the hatred being slung around, and it matters in simply planting the seeds of peace and love in the world. We can’t eliminate hunger within the world or even our community, but we’ve learned we can serve one hot meal with a healthy dose of respect and that it can matter a whole lot. We can’t eliminate single use plastics, but we’ve learned to grocery shop with reusable bags, and carry reusable water bottles and those actions add up.

There is plenty we can do, actually, there is so much we can do we struggle to decide which ways to share our love in the world, right? GOOD!!

Dear ones, a yearning for the world to be different, a lament at how things are, a longing for more justice, even fear that things might continue without change – these are beautiful expressions of HOPE. Because something in you believes this brokenness isn’t enough, and shouldn’t be enough. It meant to motivate change.

Not despair, not being overwhelmed, not learned helplessness. Change.

Hate evil and love good,
and establish justice in the gate.

It is possible. With God all things are possible. Love good dear ones, it isn’t time to give up yet. Amen

1 Stephen Pavey“12: You Must Let Us Wail” in We Cry Justice, ed. Liz Theoharis (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2021) p. 57 used with permission.

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

February 18, 2024