Sermons at FUMC Schenectady

I hear the word “disciple” used a lot in a lot of different ways, enough so that I’m not sure people know what they mean when they say it. So, years ago I decided to stop decoding it and just translate the word as it was originally meant.

A disciple is a student of a teacher. Jesus’ disciples were his students. When we talk about being disciples today we are claiming Jesus as our teacher or guru.

When the Gospel says “Go and make of all disciples” it is really an invitation to being students of Jesus together. While the early Christians called themselves “followers of the way” of Jesus, this is nuanced a bit as “learners of the way of Jesus.”

Which, I have say, I really like. At it’s core, the teachings of Jesus are neither complicated nor unique: Love God and love your neighbor. It is the living of them that is challenging.

One of the most consistent metaphors among disciples of Jesus is that of being siblings in Christ. It shows up in the New Testament, and continues to this day. If we are made kin by our shared faith, then it has implications. Because kin take care of each other. Kin redistribute resources so that everyone has enough. Kin rally to uphold those struggling. Kin have a right to make requests and sometimes even demands of each other. If we are siblings in Christ, we have responsibilities for each other.

If we are disciples, then we are siblings in Christ, students working together to understand God and engaging in mutual care and concern along the way.

The United Methodist Church talks about itself as a “connectional” church, and we are. In our structure, we are first United Methodists of Upper New York, and then this church is a local expression of the Annual Conference. We are united first of all. We also have national and global expressions, uniting us well beyond Upper New York. Which means that within our denomination we have siblings in Christ around the world.

The Gospel tell us to “go and make of all disciples” but these days, with 2+ billion Christians in the world, I think maybe that instruction might need to be heard a little bit differently. Mostly, I think the question should be about how we treat each other as kin as well as how we treat outsiders.

Which is to say, that I think the Social Principle about “Sustainable Policies and Practices” has a lot to say about how we treat our fellow disciples, and all the people on earth that God has made. Because the choices we make that are are sustainable have a lot of impact on others – as do the choices that are not sustainable. When we use single use items, they land as trash somewhere, usually near people already struggling and impoverished. When we consume fossil fuels we are using resources pulled from the earth somewhere, transported somehow, and impacting the quality of air in some places. And, those impacts too are disproportionately felt by already vulnerable people.

As a world, we desperately need sustainability, sound policies, and practices, and to think together about the long run. It is beyond time for countries to mandate that companies who make products to take on responsibility for the impact of their products and packaging over the lifetime of their products. As human beings and citizens, we need to prioritize each other’s lives and well-being over cost-cutting short-cuts.

I am the great-granddaughter of anthracite coal-miners, and there is a great example to be found in mining. Anthracite coal is the “clean coal” that fueled of of the US 100 to 150 years ago. Clean coal is, of course, a marketing scheme. One of my great-grandfathers who was a coal miner died of black lung, and the other died in a mine explosion.

But the example I’m thinking of here is that to safely mine anthracite coal, people had figured out how much coal needed to be left in “pillars” on each level of the mine in order to maintain the integrity of the mine and the land above it. As time went on, those pillars were required and regulated. And still the mine companies, after an area was completed, paid people on the side to go in and take some the pillars. After all, it was easy coal to extract and they cared about money, and not lives. Which meant collapsing mines, people buried alive, and even today the occasional collapse of homes into holes in the ground in the anthracite region.

The coal companies had no reason to care about their workers, the people who lived in their region, their impact on the environment, nor their customers. They were set up to maximize profit, and ONLY to maximize profit. And they did it, at any cost. Even taking out the pillars, even killing their employees, even lying to the public, even buying out the police, even shooting protestors and killing them. ANY cost. The anthracite coal miners ended up having some of the most important strikes in US labor history, and gained safety mechanisms, but the companies fought them every step of the way and ignored regulations continually.

It is safe to talk about the coal mine companies now, because they aren’t coal companies anymore (they are still fossil fuel companies though, so there hasn’t been a change in goals or values.) But the truth is that this is how US companies function. Once a company goes public, responsibilities are to share-holders to maximize profit. And, even private companies USUALLY follow the same model.

To even think about sustainability requires us to listen to God’s voice throughout creation calling creation good and telling people to act as stewards of the goodness. And, it would be possible to structure our country so that companies are responsible for profits AND for their employees. We could even add for the common good. Or for consumers. Or simply make them responsible for the impact of their existence.

These things are possible once we shake off the assumption that “maximizing profits” is a good reason for a company to exist! And heavens, it is a terrible reason for a society to exist.

A friend of mine spent the first few years out of law school in a warehouse looking through old documents so her firm could protect companies that engaged in prolific destruction of the environment. She hate it quite a bit, and eventually stopped being a lawyer. She also stopped recycling, and while that may sound horrifying, let me explain the reasoning. She read the papers about how much waste companies were making and she managed to fathom it. And then she thought about how much waste she made in her life and realized that unless the big producers were stopped, nothing we do as individuals would matter.

I still recycle, but her point is valid. Sometimes pretending that the container I get my yogurt in will recycle manages to help me pretend that things are OK and I have enough power to make the world a better place. But most plastic doesn’t really recycle and all of us recycling perfectly doesn’t impact things as much as changing our laws would. (Also, consuming less is just better than recycling later.)

What a wonderful line we have in our Social Principles, “Such cooperative efforts must include the development and enforcement of policies and practices that protect all sentient beings, and the promotion of sustainable economic development.” “Protect all sentient beings” is really just lovely.

Now, we aren’t going to get there all at once, nor by just wanting it. But paying attention to sustainability, caring about it, thinking about what it might look like, even being idealistic about it matters too. We won’t get there unless we think it has value and we’re willing to work on it.

For me, today, “Go and make of all disciples” means working with and for other people around the world in building the kindom of God. Which, pretty clearly, also means not making our lives easier on the backs of those already struggling more.

When you think about sustainability, what do you dream of? (Real question, asking for real tangible answers, even if they feel small.) What are you already doing? What are you ready to take on? (Also real.)

Thanks be to God for dreams of how life could be, and for the nudgings God gives us all towards it. Amen

May 31, 2026

Rev. Sara E. Baron 

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady 

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305 

Pronouns: she/her/hers 

Note, by this point in worship we'd heard the Scripture read in French, Portuguese, English, and Spanish and learned the Lord's Prayer in American Sign Language (ASL).

I hope that everyone here today has encountered a language they didn’t already know. I’m not sure you all have, because a few of you are polyglots, but I hope most of us have. And, I wonder what it is like for you to sit and listen to a rather long passage that isn’t in one of your languages. Was it boring? Was it intriguing? Was it uncomfortable? Did you try to decode it? Did you tune out? Did you notice the windows are pretty? Did you listen for any words you might be able to figure out? Was it frustrating – having your brain work so hard to connect words and meaning and missing?

When I was a teenager I spent a summer in Ecuador, and attended school as part of an attempt to get better at Spanish. (Alas, I am not a polyglot and given my years of study and exposure my Spanish is an embarrassment.) I remember being passed a note in class one time, and it was SO exciting – I was being included, someone wanted to share something with me, I had a reason to stop trying so hard to listen to the teacher and instead to focus on something fun. And, I remember a profound disappointment when I realized that the note itself was also in Spanish and I was still going to have to work really hard to figure out what it said.

I also remember feeling stuck while I was in Ecuador. I knew myself to be a person capable of nuanced thought, and wit, and even complicated ideas. But I struggled to communicate as well as a 2 year old, and realized that people interacting with me had no way of knowing the person I was on the inside- because I couldn’t articulate it to show it. I also remember that the only exception to this was trigonometry class – because I’d already done trig at home and the math terms aren’t difficult to translate and the numerals were the same and when I was asked to solve a problem on the chalkboard I could do so without any struggle.

I am really glad I had those experiences. They taught me to be in awe of anyone who speaks with an accent, because anyone speaking a language that is not their first is IMPRESSIVE. They were also important in teaching me what it feels like to be on the outside, and that helps me value finding ways to bring people in.

Now, I am blessed beyond measure to be allowed to co-Dean a camp for people with Special Needs every summer. Because I’ve been spending part of my year in the care of people with Special Needs for most of my life, and because within that population there are a significant number of people who can’t easily speak, I’ve learned some American Sign Language in passing. As we do Bible Study at camp, one verse is selected as the Memory Verse and when we learn it, we learn it in English and ASL. Truthfully the two together help all of remember, and for people who are dominate in one or the other, it is good to have space to communicate easily. Many of our campers read quite well, and all of our campers get a chance to read from the Bible every day. Sometimes that requires a lot of support. With our campers who only speak through ASL, we strategically have them read the portion of our text that includes the memory verse so they can read in ASL. (I always memorize it in ASL and English the night before.)

Forgive me, I’ve told this story before, but it meant the world to me. Once year we had a camper with us for the first time and when she got to read in ASL her whole body lit up. She signed enthusiastically in response, a sign we didn’t know and had to look up. It turned out to be “chat” as in “We’re CHATTING!!!!!!” For her, the chance to be included, by having some of Bible Study be in ASL so she could participate was AMAZING.

When I hear the Pentecost story, and hear, “Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each.” The difference between trying to figure out what someone is saying with their regionalized accent of a language you may or may not know and hearing in your own native language is PROFOUND. Until you are in a place where you don’t know what is being said, it is hard to know how big of a deal it is to be able to understand.

In Genesis 11:1-9, we get the Tower of Babel story, a narrative bent on explaining why people speak different languages while dissing the Babylonians and their Towering Temple:

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east,they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.’ And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’ The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. 6And the Lord said, ‘Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.’ So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

The Acts passage today is the full circle of this story, taking the people whose languages had been “confused” and who had been scattered and bringing them together and with the gifts of the Spirit helping them to hear and understand each other.

The people heard and understood each other. They didn’t have to work at it. It wasn’t hard. It didn’t take concentration or effort. It was, as my camper once said, “CHATTING!” Just communication, happening between people, despite it all.

The Pentecost miracle.

Beloveds, even when we speak the same language fluently, miscommunication happens a lot. It is possible that it happens more often THAN not. We misspeak, mishear, understand words and phrases differently, add assumptions to what we hear, listen with emotional filters on, and – heavens – listen to each other while we MULTITASK. It may be a miracle anything ever gets through!

And, when it does, when we speak and are understood, when we listen and are able to hear, the Holy Spirit is at work, and it is good, and we have every reason to be grateful. Thanks be to God, who speaks all the languages, and is at work in the world helping us communicate.

Amen

May 24, 2026

Rev. Sara E. Baron 

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady 

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305 

Pronouns: she/her/hers 

We, in The United Methodist Church are part of a global church. The majority of United Methodists are located outside of the United States, although I think it is important to note that the United Methodist Church is still incredibly US-Centric. We are a global church, but we’re not terribly good at being one. That said, we’re getting better, particularly as we institute the “Regionalization Plan” that will allow different parts of the church more localized authority.

Psalm 96 is a global Psalm, a universal one. While its origins are in Ancient Israel, it is a Psalm about “all the earth” with declarations to share about God’s glory to “All the nations” and “among all the peoples.” Today, because we’re celebrating Miracle Sunday, I’m going to put aside my inherent dis-ease about if that’s colonialist and/or evangelistic and assume the best.

The best, as I know it, is knowing that God is with and for all people and all peoples everywhere AND that people and people’s know God in their own ways. We are all formed by our histories, our lives, the land we live on, and the ways we see the world. I went to seminary in the southwest, and really struggled with the desert climate. Many of my classmates found the desert to be the holiest of places where they felt closest to God and I could hear their passion and even understand their reasoning…. But the desert feels foreign to me. The forests of the Northeast sing to my soul, not the desert (although, shout out to Redwood forests which are ASTOUNDING.)

A desert and a forest are both parts of God’s creation but they form and nurture people differently. In a similar way, I often notice ways that the Upper New York Annual Conference is culturally different than Wyoming was and both are distinct from who Troy was.

Relative to the world the impact of desert vs. forest and one Northeastern US United Methodist Annual Conference from another is pretty trivial, but those little differences are notable and the world is BIG and DIVERSE and WONDERFUL and there are a lot of ways of knowing God and taking care of God’s people that are different in different places.

While Methodism started in England, the United Methodist Church’s history is very United States based. It emerged as a distinct church expression because of the Revolutionary War, it was formed by the same sets of thoughts and ideas as the US government, and it has had its ideological and financial base in the United States. United Methodist Churches outside the United States mostly started through missionary work from the United States, but we’ve now gone past the tipping point and more United Methodists and United Methodist Churches are outside of this country than it.

Many of our United Methodist Siblings in faith are in Africa and the Philippines. Some are in Europe as well, where United Methodism is small but mighty. The goal of Miracle Sunday for United Methodist Churches in the United States is “to raise funds for the Endowment for Theological Education in Africa, Europe, and the Philippines, creating 500 permanently endowed scholarships each year to prepare pastors for ministry in Africa, Europe, and the Philippines. The initiative responds to a significant global leadership gap, where far fewer clergy outside the U.S. have access to advanced theological education. By uniting in prayer, learning, and generous giving, the church aims to build sustainable, long-term support for theological schools abroad and ensure well-trained pastoral leaders for generations to come.”1

The truth is that educated clergy are a mixed bag. Really! Studies show that educated clergy are less effective in growing churches and are often correlated with denomination decline. (To be fair, correlation is not causation.) After last week’s celebration of the 70th Anniversary of Full Ordination Right of Women, I got motivated to open up history books from the former Annual Conferences. At which point I read a paragraph in a biography of another historian that stayed with me:

...one of the most significant transitions which occurred within the heats and minds of religious people, specifically Methodists in this nation. I write of the acceptance of the need for sound education...We need to remember than in the early part of the last century, Conferences were made up of preachers only, and that the need for an educated clergy, as opposed to the unlettered lay preacher, had by no means been established.2

For clarity, the book was from 1984, so the prior century was the 19th.

That is, an expectation of educated clergy in Methodism in the United States isn’t that old, and it is not entirely consistent either. Elders and Deacons have very firm educational requirements prior to ordination, but many of our churches are served by people who are not ordained. Licensed Local Pastors are required to get education as they go (although they aren’t always held accountable) but sometimes churches are served faithful lay people who haven’t had the chance to get any theological education. Still, though, we are blessed in the United States with largely educated United Methodist clergy.

And while we may be less charismatic, and studies say less prone to grow churches, I think there is value in educated clergy!! At its best, education in general and theological education in particular increase a person’s capacity to be aware of their own assumptions, help people see and question the status quo, and expose people to thinking and experiences beyond their own. For much of history, clergy have had more opportunity to be educated than most people, and were thus sources of educated perspectives in their small towns and villages. That remains true in some places today. In other places – like here – there are plenty of people with education, and we simply offer a particular vein of knowledge and curiosity.

I am so grateful I got to spend 3 years getting a Masters of Divinity Degree. Exposure to different ways of thinking about God in different theological traditions broadened my perspective. Courses forced me to become aware of my beliefs about God and check them against reality and logic. Classmates shared their live experiences with me, professors shared their wisdom and research, and there was a lot of time set aside for reflecting on what we experienced in churches and how that did or didn’t fit what we thought God wanted. I loved it so much that I was ready to go get a doctorate in Spiritual Formation when I was offered the chance to come here. (Serving here is a choice I’ve never regretted.)

Back to Miracle Sunday, “In the United States, 71% of United Methodist clergy hold a master's degree in theology, outside of the U.S., fewer than 5% do. That gap is not merely an academic inconvenience. It represents communities where the church is growing rapidly but the people called to lead those communities have no sustainable access to formation. Over 20 theological schools in Africa, Europe, and the Philippines receive little or no endowment. The barriers are real: distance, language, cost, faculty shortages, library resources.”3 71% to 5%. It becomes clear why we are seeking a miracle to start creating a significant change!!

That wonderful Psalm we read, the one that has a global perspective, nudges us to acknowledge the ways things are different around the world, but ALSO urges us to create more equity around the world. People everywhere are declaring the glory of God, but the nuances should be different – and ideally might be impacted by solid education.

Or, to say it in the words of Pastor Pierre Bandorayingwe of the Congo, “God’s glory is not confined to one culture; it is a global calling.”4 He also says, “Miracle Sunday is an act of faith: giving so that others may be formed and sent. God invites every congregation, regardless of size, location or circumstances, to join the mission of declaring God’s glory among the nations.”

Now, I want to have some transparency. We in this church are big fans of education, and we’re already supporting some really important educational initiatives We’re working with Upper New York on supporting dorm construction for Africa University and we’re working on our own to provide funds for students to get laptops at Africa University. And AU does theological education! There is a possibility this Miracle Sunday isn’t as distinct of a project here as it might be elsewhere.

But, nevertheless it gave us a chance to be more informed about the nature of The United Methodist Church, educated clergy, and to be reminded of how Big God is when we say God is the God of all peoples. So, for those who are willing and able to give today – thanks be to God! For those willing to become educated and serve – thanks be to God! For those who serve as clergy without the foundations of education – thanks be to God! And for this amazing and diverse world where we can all sing to God a new song in our OWN languages – thanks be to God! Amen

1https://www.unyumc.org/event-details/miracle-sunday-2026

2Jack Topolewski, “With Deep Thanksgiving: Wyoming’s Historians” in Notes and Sketches From Along the Susquehanna, ed by John Goodell and John Topolewski (Academy Books, Rutland Vermont, 1984), p 10.

3https://www.neumc.org/Miracle

On Monday we celebrated 70 years of full ordination rights and clergy membership for Women in the United Methodist Church – which is as we’ve already mentioned in worship a little more complicated that it initially sounds. What history isn’t? Really that happened in the Methodist Episcopate Church (of which this church was part at the time) and there had been clergy women for the prior 36 years but they were “locally ordained” which means two things: they had no guaranteed appointments and they had no to access to retirement funds.

Women preachers existed in the Methodist movement from the time of John Wesley whose own mother was a FABULOUS preacher through 1880 when rights were taken away and then in 1920 women regained local ordination and in 1956 full ordination rights. For all those years women preached, led, taught, and organized.The first woman who was given full clergy rights and membership in the Annual Conference was Maud Keister Jensen who got those rights TWO WEEKS after they became available in the Central Pennsylvania Annual Conference which merged into the Susquehanna Annual Conference – our sibling conference in our current episcopal structure. She gained her rights in abstensia cause she was a missionary serving in Korea. When she eventually heard it had happened she responded by wire, “I am deeply grateful for the privilege, but the honor was completely unexpected and due entirely to the early meeting of my Annual Conference. I feel that Georgia Harkness and other active women ministers deserve first recognition after their long struggle and able contributions to the church.” 1 2

In case you didn’t know, Georgia Harkness was the first woman to teach in a US seminary, and she’s from upstate NY and even lived and taught Sunday School here in the Albany District. Which is to say that this history is our history. And Rev. Jensen’s words emphasized how much she was part of a movement of women working together for each other.

The framing of this celebration of Ordination has been that it was a movement of the Holy Spirit, and that’s clearly true. It even sounds like our gospel passage where the Holy Spirit is called the Spirit and truth and remains with us to remind us of our call to love God and each other! Because, loving people involves letting them do the work God calls them to. (SNAP.) It seems worth mentioning though that even at that historical General Conference in 1956 where full ordination rights and conference membership for women were accepted, it wasn’t the plan! 2000 petitions came in about the topic, and the committee that was responsible for them came to the floor of the plenary with a majority report that meant to allow SOME women rights but only if they were single or widowed AND a minority report that hoped to prevent ALL women from full rights. A whole lot of people were in the Spirit’s way.

But she moved anyway.

And since then it is has been good and bad and in-between. And to share some of that, I invite my sisters to speak. (Remarks by Rev. Eileen Deming, Rev. Dana Carroll, Rev. Jane Baker, Rev. Pat Loughlin, and Rev. Sara Baron followed.)

1Many of these details came from the podcast/video found here: https://www.youtube.com/live/JJTpqiUF8uU?si=WXUiGyLC4_oT3NQy

Biblical Scholars who study the first 5 books of the Bible – the Torah, distinguish 4 unique “voices” in the text. One is the one that calls God YWHW; one is the one that calls God El; one is the Priestly voice that is always cleaning thing, putting things in order, and making things sound appropriately liturgical; and the final one is the Deuteronomy voice which is mostly found in Deuteronomy. Like any theory, this one is debated, and not everyone agrees about it.

What I find particularly interesting is the idea that both the source that call God YWHW and the one that calls God El are primarily folk wisdom, the first from the Southern Kingdom and the Second from the Northern. The Priestly and Deuteronomy voices are professional theologians making things more palatable for other professionals. But our Bible itself speaks tells a lot of folk wisdom. The stories are often really good stories that tell important truths and also (from this religious professional’s perspective) have some issues. They make assumptions, they personify God. They’re inconsistent. They’re messy.

And, I love them. They feel more real and more human than the other voices. They tell me about how other people have struggled to make sense of the world, and life, and hardship, and God and they don’t feel obligated to make things more perfect than they really are. They’re human stories with great wisdom that tell great truths about God and also sometimes don’t.

If you are wondering, these folk stories include Adam and Eve, Noah and the flood, the Jacob and Esau disasters, and … well, actually most of the Torah.

It seems worth mentioning this because European based civilizations often claim cultural dominance over indigenous wisdom because of the Bible, and I think we should be honest that a lot of the Bible is based in indigenous wisdom too. And while that is true, it is also true that it has been used to do great harm.

When I was in elementary school we were asked to write about what time and place in history we’d want to go back and experience. I gave what I thought was the obvious answer and said that since I was female and I didn’t want to back to any time or place where I’d have LESS rights, I’d like to experience the Americas before the Europeans arrive. I also thought I’d like to use my part of the world in as would look if it could be used sustainably – although clearly that wasn’t the language I used. Now, I was a child. I fully admit that I wish that I didn’t lump together all Native Americans. I also wish I’d known that lots of indigenous cultures offered freedom and respect women – not just the ones in this hemisphere.

The reason I remember this exercise though is not because of the imperfections of my thinking. It is because of the responses of my classmates who thought my idea was TERRIBLE. How could I even think of wanting to be a part of THAT. I don’t actually remember exactly what versions of horrible stereotypes came at me, but they were ugly. And I found them unconvincing. I was firm that t I wasn’t going back to any European or European influenced culture where I was dismissed because of gender.

In my life, I have often tried to figure out exactly what went wrong in Europe and the Near East. In so many places in the world people created egalitarian societies that engaged in mutual responsibilities and care. Resources have been shared well in many societies, enough so that competitive models of great wealth and massive poverty are historically weird. Although, let’s note, they’re common back to the time of Jesus, and even the Hebrew Bible seems to be fighting against it a lot, so its our long term tradition even it if it isn’t normal.

However it came to be, I am one of many inheritors of a system that massively benefits the few at the expense of the masses and justifies it by dehumanizing people in a variety of forms. Women, people of color, anyone who is poor, people with disabilities, those whose live started in other cultures, those who speak other languages, and any member of the queer or trans community – for example – are to various degrees “othered” and not fully human and thus OK to oppress and steal from. That is, I’m not that impressed with whatever is the opposite of “Traditional Wisdom” and where it has gotten us.

And, when we read about the value of Traditional Wisdom found in Indigenous Communities, I’m fully in. I don’t entirely understand what is wrong with our society and the ones it emerged from, but I’m grateful for each and every community that knows and practices other ways of being.

Today, on Native American Ministries Sunday, it is imperative not just to celebrate the wisdom of Indigenous Peoples in North America, but also to name The United Methodist Church’s collective sins against Native Peoples. The United Methodist Church and its peoples were instrumental in setting up “Indian Schools” that stole Native American children from their families and tribes, abused them, and tried to erase their wisdom and replace it with competitive capitalism. AND, A Methodist clergyman led the massacre at Sand Creek in 1864. (This is a sickening enough narrative that I leave it to you to research and will not share the details in worship, but it is important to know about.)

There are many reasons to engage in Native American Ministries Sunday. Those include the chance to hear some of the wisdom of our siblings in faith, to notice our Sibling Churches that are Native American and consider giving to support their important ministries, and to learn our own history of harm. Knowing what people have done in God’s name by our church is important for not repeating it, for learning why others may be hesitant about our tradition or repelled by it, and for humility. Christianity as a whole and United Methodists in particular have done great harm while claiming to act for God.

Our Scripture today is another version of a Creation story, a poetic one, that focuses on the delight of creation. To me, it feels like part of our Scriptures that give us great space to engage with delight with other sources of wisdom. The space seems small between worship this God the Creator and the traditional wisdom of Native Americans who know the sanctity of Mother Earth. They’re different, to be sure, but could be conversational! Those of us who think of God as Creator know Creation to be a source of wisdom and knowledge about the Creator. Those who know Mother Earth to be holy know the wisdom and knowledge she gives to be Truth.

Despite our history, both as a church and a nation, Native Americans are still alive today, and some are United Methodists. In Upper New York there are three Native American United Methodist churches:

Four Corners United Methodist Church, located on the Cattaraugus Territory

Hogansburg United Methodist church located on the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation at Akwesasnee

Onondaga Nation United Methodist Church located on the Onondaga Nation Indian Territory

Some of us here participated in a Volunteer in Mission Trip to Hogansburg in 2015, working on building a handicap accessible ramp into their sanctuary and getting to know truly wonderful people. The sweet grass basket we usually display in Fellowship Hall was a gift from that church to our VIM team. The Native American churches in our Annual Conference are not wealthy churches, as the territories and reservations are places where resources are scarce and needs are high. The history of the ways that Native Americans WERE treated in our country and by our church continues to impact lives today in every way.

And, those churches are vibrant, loving, and grace-filled places filled with extraordinary people who are able to hold multiple truths from multiple traditions together. They’ve enriched my life and my faith, and I count myself lucky for each interaction I’ve had and for the Native American churches we’re connected to through our denomination – despite it all.

As the preacher, it is my responsibility to pick Scripture texts for the week, and I most commonly pick from 4 texts recommended by the Revised Common Lectionary. These days it is also my responsibility to pair the readings with particular parts of The United Methodist Social Principles and it has occurred to me that my pairing today come with some assumptions.

The Gospel reading has Jesus talking about how sheep know the voice of their shepherd, and trust their shepherds, and the shepherd wants good for the sheep. So, too, then does Jesus care about all of us and take good care of all of us. It follows, but isn’t spoken, that we know the voice of God and attend to it and trust God’s voice.

And I picked the Social Principle on Eco-systems as the partner passage to the Gospel. This make sense to me, but might not make sense to others because when I think of the sacred voice of God that we’re tuning in to, Mother Earth is one of the tones of that voice. For me, to listen to God and to listen to nature/ Mother Earth/ Creation are so correlated as to be hard to tease out. But, it seems important to acknowledge that not everyone experiences Creation that way, and you may or may not have had any idea why I connected these two passages.

With in the Social Principle we hear, “Whether human beings are conscious of it or not, we are participants in and beneficiaries of complex natural ecosystems…” So many of the messes we are in today as a society seem to stem from the ways we haven’t remembered that we are participants in and beneficiaries of complex natural eco-systems. Including, I think, ways that people dismiss and distrust the wisdom of their bodies as an important source of knowledge!

Together, the Gospel passage and our Social PrInciple seem to me to remind us to attend to the Sacred. The sheep know the shepherd’s voice, and we are to attend to God’s voice, which can come to us in many ways.

The gospel says, “They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers." I wonder what voices we associate as being the voices of not-God. Perhaps there are many? The voices calling for violence. The voices claiming that some people aren’t made in the image of God. The voices encouraging us to consume our way out of discomfort. The voices that tell us to hurry, to rush, to do more, that what we’re doing isn’t enough. The voices that claim scarcity – arguing that God didn’t make the world full of abundance. The voices of hopelessness that argue against the story of resurrection.

There are a lot of voices calling for our attention, that don’t benefit us or the kindom.

In fact, many days, if one attends to the news and/or social media, the voices of harm are overwhelming.

But, beloveds, we are called to attend to the Voice of God. That may even suggest we are to limit the amount we listen to the voices of harm.

Hopefully, this raises a question within us, “What does it mean to attend to the voice of God?” You will probably not be surprised that I think a great piece of this is to attend to nature/creation/Mother Earth. People who study attention say that one of the best things we can do for our modern-phone-addicted-minds is to put them on “do not disturb” and go into nature. Depending on our bodies and their abilities this might be a walk on a nature trail or sitting on a bench in a park – but I believe the further we get into un-manicured nature the more our brains and spirits can heal.

I also think that worship, prayer, and meditation are ways to attend to the Voice of God. One of the scientific pieces that supports the value of worship itself is that group singing is great for human beings! It connects us to each other in a myriad of ways, and connecting to each other is really good for our whole beings! Worship also gives us a chance to consider the values we live by, and talk together about what we’ve noticed from and about God. And, I’ll note, the pace of worship is slower than a lot of life. Sometimes there are transitions that simply take a bit, and it is OK. We have music that centers us and a space that fills us up and people to be with and it is glorious even when its just sort of a normal Sunday.

Prayer and meditation, sometimes called spiritual practices are intentional means of bringing our attention to God and away from other voices. Walking a labyrinth or coloring a mandala can be ways of letting our body have activity so the rest of our being can attend to God. Watching a sunset, or the stars, or listening to music, or the sound of waves hitting sand can fill us with awe and take of the weights off our shoulders. Writing in a journal or simply praying from our hearts helps us find words for the things we are worried about and the ones we are delighted in, and as we give them to God we find we can hold them differently. In prayer and meditation we manage to simultaneously make space to attend to God and ourselves, and in the best cases to tune ourselves to God.

One of the practices I’ve found most astounding in recent years are the practices of somatic awareness. These practices are ones that start with the assumption that our bodies know things and when we attend to their wisdom we become more whole. The ways I’ve been taught about somatic practices have startled me because they’re so different from anything else I knew before them. The practice I know best comes from Nonviolent Communication training, and “nonviolent communication” is really a method of attending to feelings and needs so we communicate with more integrity.

One of my teachers taught us that the feelings we feel are at their core sensations in our bodies that we’ve learned to name with feelings words. (Well, that’s if we’re lucky. Sometimes even feelings words can be new to some of us.) With some intentionality, and some help, we can start to find the sensations under our feelings and when we do that we learn even more about their intensity, connections, and nuances.

Turning to our bodies as sources of wisdom undercuts a lot of what we’ve been taught in this world, and gets us back to being a part of the natural world. We are creatures like all others, and our bodies are sacred and wise.

Our bodies are often ahead of our cognizant awareness. They know when we don’t feel safe, and when we really like another person. They hold our tensions and our traumas, and also give us clues about our joy and delight. I’m going to go so far here as to say that our bodies are a source of connection to God, and a way we are able to attend to God, and it can be really wonderful to explore that connection.

I really love the Emmaus story. I love the way it is a journey to the place the people thought they were going that ended up leading them right back to where they started- transformed – hours later. I love the way it speaks to the power of communion “he was made known to them in the breaking of the bread.” I love the scholarship that suggests that one or both of the disciples were likely a woman because that’s who wouldn’t be named in a story. I love John Dominic Crossan’s line “Emmaus never happened, Emmaus always happens” to talk about the larger Truths of the Bible contained in the story even if the stories themselves aren’t factually accurate.

All week I smiled to myself in happy anticipation of preaching on a text I like so much with so many wonderful facets to attend to and then I sat down to write and I had nothing. Nothing. NOTHING!

For hours.

I haven’t had a sermon block this hard in a long time. I couldn’t think of a single thing I wanted to stay about this passage that I REALLY, really like.

So I procrastinated. And while doing that I read my e-mails. During which I opened on by Frank Rogers, a Spirituality Professor at Claremont School of Theology, whose book “Cradled in the Arms of Compassion” is one of the most formational books I’ve read in the past decade. And, wouldn’t you know it, the email from Dr. Rogers was a snippet from another of his books and it was EXCELLENT. The book is “The Radical Way of Jesus: The Spiritual Path of Transformative Compassion”.

Mostly, beloveds, it has nothing to do with Emmaus. But it has everything to do with everything else, and it is so well said, and I had nothing. So, here is most of his email:

Religions promote compassion. All else is commentary. When true to their spiritual essence, religious traditions do no more than deepen people’s connection to the compassionate source of life, restore people to the fullness of loved and loving vitality, and send people forth with expanded capacities to be active embodiments of compassion in the world. This is the heartbeat of any religion that is truly spiritually alive—its communities, teachings, and practices beat with the pulse of compassion, and it nurtures the pulse of compassion within the heartbeat of its followers. Quite simply, religious traditions are meant to be spiritual paths of transformative love. They are called to be schools of compassion.

Christianity is no exception. Its vital essence lies not in being a religion but in creating a spiritual path—and the spiritual path that it maps out is one of transformative compassion.

Now, to suggest that Christianity is less a religion and more a spiritual path of compassion demands critical scrutiny. For one thing, religions are constituted by religious forms—sacred writings, liturgical practices, codes of conduct, and the like—and Christianity is as laden with religious forms as any other religion. Christianity includes institutions to belong to, creeds to believe in, commandments to obey, doctrines to espouse, clerics to esteem, texts to internalize, and rituals to practice with steadfast routine. Often these forms become ends in themselves—their observance demanded regardless of how wooden or rote they have become. Anthony de Mello, SJ, an Indian Jesuit priest, compares this to visiting a restaurant and eating the cardboard menu.

We should not confuse religious forms with the palpable Presence of the Divine. Forms may contain that Presence, mediate that Presence, bear witness to that Presence, but the forms themselves provide a feeble substitute for the living reality of God. As Sandra Lommasson conceives of them, religious forms are like the ring of stones that encircle a sacred fire. Stones can shelter a fire, even intensify its warmth and enhance its strength, but stones grow cold if the fire within dissolves into cinders. The stones of Christian religious forms are as vulnerable to such coldness as any other ring of religious stones.

More troubling, however, is the tragic truth that these stones have often been used to bruise and to batter. The shadow side of Christianity has contributed as much violence to our world as it has peace and compassion. Throughout history, wars have been waged and territories raped in the bloody spread of the gospel. Muslims and Jews, women and witches, gay people and pagans, the divorced, the unorthodox, the sexually active, and the sexually abused have all been burned on the sinister stakes of Christian intolerance. Church teachings and spiritual practices have demonized our emotions, bodies, passions, depressions, hungers, urges, egos, doubts, and pride while feeding the shame-filled self-loathing that has ravaged innumerable souls. And through it all, ecclesiastical hierarchies, communities of faith, and families of Christian conviction have all too often silenced dissent, demanded obedience, required conformity, and exacted fidelity in unyielding and scarring alliance with the Christ they have created. If Christianity is a spiritual path of compassion, this path has sometimes been very well concealed.

Nevertheless, the heartbeat at the core of Christian spirituality pulsates with compassion. This beat began with the spiritual teacher who inaugurated this path in the first place. Jesus of Nazareth never intended to found a religion. Strictly speaking, he was not even Christian. He was a Jewish mystic, an itinerant rabbi, and a social prophet much like Jeremiah before him or Martin Luther King Jr., who later followed in his footsteps. To be sure, Jesus’ followers—on Easter and beyond—experienced a risen Christ, a living and eternal presence across time and space. Yet that risen Christ was the living presence of a very particular man, and that presence only confirmed and sustained that man’s historical teachings.

And this man Jesus was decidedly Jewish. He attended the synagogue and observed the faithful practices of having a bar mitzvah and reciting the Shema daily. He absorbed the stories of Moses, Elijah, holy men, and liberators, and he studied the law and the prophets. He kept the sabbath, taught the Torah, celebrated Passover, and made pilgrimage to Jerusalem. To his death, Jesus remained unwaveringly devoted to the faith of his people. Yes, he exposed hypocrisy, critiqued abuse, and encouraged radical renewal, but his teachings and practices were rooted in the living essence of the faith to which he passionately committed himself.

Jesus was also Jewish within a very specific historical context. Jesus was a poor peasant within a brutally occupied land. This occupation possessed political, economic, and ecclesiastical dimensions. Politically speaking, Palestine was a conquered territory. A strategic trade and travel corridor within the Roman Empire, the country was ruled by Roman proxies—Pontius Pilate, for example—and garrisons of ever-present Roman centurions. The Roman governor maintained order through Jewish aristocratic rulers, such as Herod the Great, who lived in obscene luxury in exchange for their service to the Roman Empire. These Jewish rulers were ruthless in their own right. One was so debased that, as an orgy gift to an exotic dancer, he had John the Baptist, the mentor who baptized Jesus, beheaded.

Economically speaking, the peasant class of Palestine—90 percent of the population—paid the price for keeping peace with the Empire and maintaining the opulence of the aristocratic elite. Taxation—severe beyond human endurance—generated so much resentment that tax collectors, though fellow townspeople, became social pariahs. When farmland fell into foreclosure, absentee landlords seized it. Indentured servants, day laborers, and people encumbered by impossible debt so populated the countryside that their plight was immediately recognizable to those who heard Jesus’ parables.

...

Within this land of military occupation, economic depression, and religious exploitation, Jesus traveled from town to town and gathered the people, healed the wounded, and shared a message that brought hope to the hopeless. All who encountered him recognized that something was special about this man. He had a presence about him, the aura of a man on intimate terms with God. He had a kindness about him, an understanding for the plight of the suffering and a care for the weak and discarded. He had an authority about him, an inner wisdom as present while debating with the religious experts as when illuminating the scriptures through stories to the poor. Clearly this man knew a way of sustaining life within the system of death that surrounded him. He knew how to live in harmony with God apart from the snares of the religious structures. He knew how to claim dignity and power in the midst of forces that try to deaden and dehumanize. He knew how to practice peace within the violence of an oppressive society.

In short, Jesus was a spiritual teacher. Like Buddha or Lao Tzu or Mohammed, he taught a path of transformation—a means, at once personal and political, internal and external, through which people may live vitally connected to God. This way of life is what most characterized those who pledged allegiance to Jesus. Indeed, his earliest disciples were known after his death not as Christians but as followers of the Way.

The Way that Jesus taught was radical, both in the sense of its rising from the deepest taproot of his tradition and in its scandalous upending of the foundational assumptions on which an entire system of oppression was based. It offered a radical understanding of an extravagantly loving God and how such a God could be known; it promoted a radical sense of human dignity and a capacity for emboldened and abundant life; and it cultivated an ethic of radical care that extended not only to loved ones, neighbors, and strangers but also to enemies, opponents, and oppressors. This path of Jesus—summed up as loving God with every dimension of our being, cultivating an authentic love for ourselves, and loving our neighbors as ourselves—was, at its core, a way of radical compassion.1

To assuage my guilt at using Frank Roger’s words rather than my own, I’m going to mention that I think the Emmaus story is actually a really lovely story of compassion. The visitor along the road who talked with the disciples gave them space to tell their stories! And helped them make meaning of it! He responded to their welcome and invitation and shared a meal with them. And it was in those hours of walking and talking, in being heard and understanding things a new, and in sharing together, that the disciples were transformed. It is almost as if in being present with compassion, the visitor along the road changed everything for them. And I’ll note that this is likely a story that has been true many times, in many times and places. Approaching people with compassion can be incredibly transformational.

Phew. Now I feel like I at least connected the email with the story. And that frees me to go back to the main idea of the passage. “Religions promote compassion. … They are called to be schools of compassion.” I believe this. And I think it is a really useful framework for thinking about what we are doing as people of faith. What things that we do help us build capacity to be compassionate? Those are good and important! Where do we experience compassion? Those are important! When are we able to expression compassion in places it is desperately needed? That’s important! Frank Rogers said this as, “When true to their spiritual essence, religious traditions do no more than deepen people’s connection to the compassionate source of life, restore people to the fullness of loved and loving vitality, and send people forth with expanded capacities to be active embodiments of compassion in the world.“ That’s the point of it all!

I appreciate reminders of what we’re all about. When we talk about being an Easter people, following a risen Christ, knowing a God of resurrection, it is a means to building and living compassion. We are people of a compassionate God, often called the Merciful God.

Beloveds, I see your compassion in what you do and don’t do, in what you say an don’t say, in how you think about decisions you are making and how you engage with others. You are a community of compassion, which is to say you are people of God. I am so thankful for you, and for Frank Roger’s words, and for having something wonderful to share with you today even when I didn’t have anything on my own. Thanks be to God! Amen

1While I got this in an email, it is most easily accessed here: https://frankrogersjr.substack.com/p/the-radical-way-of-jesus?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=6495423&post_id=194332493&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1vgibm&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

April 19, 2026

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

Friends, beloveds of God, I’m going to take a moment to place myself in context. I am a United Methodist pastor. The United Methodist Church was formed with a set of immutable Articles of Religion, the third of which reads:

Christ did truly rise again from the dead, and took again his body, with all things appertaining to the perfection of man’s nature, wherewith he ascended into heaven, and there sitteth until he return to judge all men at the last day.

To return to context, I am also a scientifically minded person of faith and I serve a church where faith and science have long lived together in harmony. The hymn “Praise the Source of Faith and Learning”1 says quite beautifully what I and many here believe:

May our faith redeem the blunder

of believing that our thought

has displaced the grounds for wonder

which the ancient prophets taught.

May our learning curb the error

which unthinking faith can breed l

est we justify some terror with an antiquated creed. (vs 3)

And given all that, what do we do with Easter? At one point, in my last church, a 3 year old said to me, “You know that story we talked about in spring… the one where Jesus died and then he didn’t? When you die, you die? So….?” I thought she made a good point. I in fact remember working furiously in my head to answer her in a way that fit her age without diminishing her question and in the meantime I ended up giving her my real answer as filler… and it worked! She took it!

The real answer was that I’m not too worried about what happened 2000 years ago, I’m interested in the story that God’s love doesn’t die and Jesus’s ministry didn’t die with him but continued on his people and continues on with us even today and when we say “Christ is Alive” what we really mean is that we are continuing his life with ours.

Throughout my ministry, I’ve also leaned strongly on Bishop John Shelby Spong’s summary of Easter that “something happened” and whatever that something was, it transformed a bunch of terrified disciples who had fled, into a group of solid faith leaders who stayed even to their own deaths. These two pieces “something happened” and “what matters is that we continue Jesus work with our own lives” has gotten me through a lot of Easter sermons.

But, for some reason, this year, I want to go a little deeper. This seems like a ridiculous idea because refusing to do so has worked really well for a while now, but here we are. So let me just say that if you are a person who can painlessly believe in bodily resurrection then you are firmly and emphatically doing well according to The United Methodist Church and I applaud your faith and the ways you got there.

Now, for the rest of you. Let’s do this thing.

Each of the Gospels tells the Easter story in a different way, some of them in several different ways within one Gospel. When we once did a Bible study on the Resurrection narratives we were startled at how little is similar.

Today we’re working with Matthew. His story says that Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” (which other Mary? I want to know. My commentaries do not) went to see the tomb early on Sunday morning. While there they experienced an earthquake and then saw an angel who rolled away the stone. The angel was bright and shiny as was his clothing, he freaked out the guards, he gave the women a message. They left “with fear and great joy” to tell the disciples and “Suddenly Jesus met them and said, ‘Greetings!’ And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers and sisters to go to Galilee; there they will see me.’” (9-10)

That’s the story. The angel who showed up was last seen in Joseph’s dream in 2:19, the angel has all the trappings associated with angels, and the whole story is curious in that it is much more about the angel than Jesus.

The Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (yes, that one, my favorite) has REALLY interesting commentary on this passage. That is, it says, “The appearances of both the angel of the Lord and of the crucified Jesus are best described as altered-state-of-consciousness experiences. They are quite real. The visionaries see a being from an alternate reality (the realm of God) and then the crucified Jesus, also in alternate reality, where he continues to live. The interpretation that the visionaries gave to these experiences was that God raised Jesus from the dead.”2 The commentary goes on to talk about resurrection narratives in general saying:

“Altered States of Consciousness...are common in much of the world and yet generally unavailable to human perception in a culture such as ours. … There is no reason not to take these persons seriously, at their word, and interpret what they have to say within the framework of their culture – and not ours. What this means is that if the disciples witness to repeatedly experiencing the risen Lord, it is only because they were culturally prepared to have such experiences.”3

And then it goes on to talk about altered states of consciousness in general saying. “Anthropologists studying cross-cultural psychology define altered states of consciousness as conditions in which sensations, perceptions, cognition, and emotions are altered. … When a person is in such a state, the experience modifies the relationship of the individual to self, body, sense of identity, and the environment of time, space, or other people. One scholar has identified twenty such states of consciousness.”4 That is, 19 states of altered consciousness and “normal.” Moving on, “Mainstream U.S. culture frowns upon and even denies the human capacity for trances, visions, and experiences of alternate realities. We are very curious about nonrational dimensions of human existence, but tend to label all such occurrences as irrational.”5 We’re weird on that. We the US. In our society we pretend we are able to be objective, and that we always are. The authors conclude, “If we recognize that ‘objectivity’ is simply socially tutored subjectivity, we might be more empathetic with persons of other cultures who report perceptions that we find incredible just because they are socially dysfunctional for us.”6 (329)

I really, really appreciate this perspective. This feels like what could be the footnote under Bishop Spong’s “something happened” as the most likely explanation. People experienced something, we aren’t sure if it was a vision or a dream or what it was, but it was profoundly life changing for them and the way they could explain it to others was to say that Jesus was still with them after his death. And, since that fit the understanding of the time, where many Jewish people believed in the possibility of bodily resurrection,7 the metaphor gained momentum as the way it got talked about.

Beloveds, the thing here is, to talk about Easter requires us to acknowledge that altered states of consciousness exist and can be important. That’s not necessarily something we talk about a lot. But, ignoring that altered consciousness can be a powerful reality is just silly. They often change the trajectory of people’s lives. This isn’t just something that happened on one Easter 2000 years ago.

Many people speak tentatively about their experiences, but I’ve heard powerful stories of near death experiences, the wonder of being present to the thin veil at deaths and births, profound dreams and visions, as well as life-changing worship services prayer times, and meditations. That’s not all. People experience profound and life changing moments when they see the sunrise, glimpse a rainbow, hear a piece of music, reconnect with a loved one. And, I think in a lot of cases those are also states of consciousness Truly, even the modern idea of “flow” is probably an altered state of consciousness, one where we lose track of time and just savor being in the present doing what we are doing. For me, that’s making dinner most nights.

We are human beings, we are meaning makers! Whether we are in an altered state of consciousness or simply aware of the profound beauty of reality, we make meaning of it and it forms us. For many people deep down in the core of their faith is some experience like this that has formed their life. (Maybe several). Sometimes, even those aren’t their own experience, but that of a parent or grandparent or parent in faith who passed it down to them. That isn’t to say everyone has them, but it is to say that these experiences are common and real and valuable. I was really stuck in the commentary about the visionary experience of the women on Easter morning the line “It was real.” The vision was real, and that’s real!

Sometimes, in this place where engineers have roamed and logic has been valued, we haven’t been good at making space for the fact that faith is more than logic and concrete realities. But Easter pushes us to acknowledge that the central narrative of our Christian faith tradition, the story that Christ died but lives among us, isn’t logical nor concrete. And yet it is real.

And it is particularly important because most of the time the ways we experience the Divine in our lives is not in the concrete, coherent, logical aspects of our lives. Although I will say that’s where good theology lives and I like good theology. Most of the ways that we experience God acting in the world requires us to be open to the Divine, so it mostly happens in altered states of consciousness. This is also why I’m often pushing prayer and meditation and spiritual practices because they’re are INTENTIONALLY altered states of consiouslness.

So, this Easter I’m grateful for a story that pushes us. That reminds us that we’re formed by things we can’t entirely explain. Matthew says that Jesus says to the women, “Greetings!” and the story unfolds, and keeps unfolding. A real experience of 2000 years ago lives on still in our lives. How great is that? Christ is Risen indeed! Alleluia, praise be to God works in the world in all kinds of ways! Amen

1Thomas Troeger in The Faith We Sing #2004, copyright 1987 Oxford University Press Inc.

2Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) “Textual Notes: Luke 16:1-16” p. 140.

3Ibid, 399.

4Ibid, 327

5Ibid, 328-9.

6Ibid, 329.

7The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version Bible Translation, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), footnotes on this text.

Easter - April 5, 2026

The Roman Empire was doing it’s Empire thing. It controlled its territories and their people by keeping the regional leaders on a short leash. They were expected to pay taxes, obey orders, and be responsive to whatever the Emperor wanted. The regional leaders passed those expectations down the line, and it continued, landing of course most strongly on the poor people. People were losing their ancestral lands all over the place due to tax policies, those without land were forced into day labor where sufficient calories were hard to come by and life ended young. Power, violence, and instability, were tools used to keep the system going.The idiosyncrasies of various Emperors almost didn’t matter, their desires and their capacity to change their minds and make new demands was all people needed to know.

Furthermore, the Empire knew how to use religion to its own advantage. The Jerusalem Temple looked like it always had, but the leaders were appointed by and responsive to the Empire. Which meant it wasn’t serving God nor God’s people. It was, shall we say, a bit Nationalistic, or maybe we’d call it Jewish Empiricism. (OK, I’m trying to say it was the Roman version of White Christian Nationalism, but I think my premise is good and language is weak, so here I am spelling it out.)

Yet, the power of the stories of faith and people’s experiences of God’s actions to free people from oppression couldn’t be squelched. The Passover, those holy holy days, celebrated the acts of God to free the people from the Pharaoh’s power in Egypt, and people gathered in the city to worship and give thanks for that story and how it had formed their lives.

Which meant, of course, that Passover was ripe for uprising despite the Empire’s best efforts. And they knew it, so they counteracted it. The local leader for the Empire usually resided on the Mediterranean coast, but came up to Jerusalem for Passover along with supplicants and supporters and enough military might to encourage people to think twice about starting a revolution.

That year, as usual, Governor Pilate came from the West, from the Coast, with banners with golden eagles to represent Rome, and gleaming horses, and pounding drums, showing patriotism and the not terribly subtly threatening state violence against any who would stand in their way. It was an annual display, calculated and intentional, the sort of thing people would come out and see and be awed by. The Empire’s crowd stayed through Passover, and returned home after the city stopped being over-filled with religious people celebrating God’s acts of freeing them from their oppressor. The people were trained, and as the parade passed by they shouted: Hail Caesar, son of God; Praise be to the Savior who brought the Roman Peace; Caesar is Lord.

Power, money, threats of violence, gleaming in the sunlight and marching along in step. I can see it. I can think of the sorts of people who would get a thrill from it. I can even see the strategy of it.

It seems that Jesus could too. So, like a parable that he enacted rather than spoke, he made clear what was going on. That is, he led a counter-parade. He came in the eastern gates – he came from the other side. He came without military precision, and without a military. He came as a man on a donkey (or two if you want to get literal about Matthew which can be amusing although otherwise not helpful.) And, in the Eastern side, the crowds are said to shout something different: "Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!" Hosanna means “save us we pray.”

The power, the money, the threats of violence came in from the west. Jesus came in on his own from the east. He showed the parade for what it was – a threat of violence. He offered a contrast that looked like the kindom of God.

The Jesus seminar thinks that Mark’s version of this story is most accurate, and about it they say:

For his part Jesus made it clear that he was entering Jerusalem to face death (10:33). In that case the ‘triumphal entry’ as Mark depicts it is a satire of revolutionary processions and of the kind of triumphal entry the Romans enjoyed making into cities they had conquered. The Romans celebrated their victories with horse, chariot, and a show of arms – with a military parade. In contrast, Jesus entered Jerusalem on a beast of burden. Thus Jesus was not making a statement about his own messiahship, but contrasting God’s imperial rule (“Congratulations, you poor! God’s domain belongs to you”) with Roman Imperial Rule.1

There is significant scholarly debate about this whole Palm Sunday passage, particularly since it looks like Jesus was claiming kingship and messiahship to some eyes – which leads some scholars to think this whole thing was a later addition to the story. I’m not one of the ones whose votes count in Biblical scholarship, but I tend to think Palm Sunday happened AND was one of the reasons Jesus got killed. (The Temple protest being another reason.)

The conclusion of the Jesus seminar that he knew he was riding to his death tracks for me, it makes more sense that he was making a mockery of displays of power and violence than that he was trying to claim an ancient kingship out from under the Roman Empire. But I do think he was trying to undermine the Roman Empire, and I think he was trying to change things to be better for the people, and I think the contrasts between “Hail Caesar, son of God; Praise be to the Savior who brought the Roman Peace; Caesar is Lord.” and “Save us, We Pray” are pretty notable.

So Jesus is doing his thing on a donkey riding into the city and the people GET IT. They’re grabbing those symbolic palm branches, they’re shouting “Save us, we pray,” they’re throwing their CLOAKS on the road for him. And I continue to be blown away by that last bit because we talk about cloaks sometimes, right? Jesus’ followers were people who had two articles of clothing: inner and outer. And the outer garment, the cloak, was so important for survival that the Hebrew Scriptures ban anyone from keeping it as loan collateral overnight. Cloaks were necessary for survival and people ONLY HAD ONE. And there they are throwing them on the road for the donkey to walk on?

Fine, let’s note, this part is probably a later addition to the story by the Early Christian Community trying to get a point across of how important Jesus was. But, boy they do it for me because I want to make sure that if the people are throwing out their cloaks they are GOING BACK TO GET THEM AFTERWARDS because the nights will still come anyway. This is the sort of act of faith that borders on suicidal and it really bugs me. But, symbolically it is powerful, I’ll give you that.

The contrasts between the military show of might and power and the man on the donkey are pretty stark.

So, too, are the differences between the kingdoms of this world and the kindom of God.

Because it turns out that the power of violence just looks really different from the power of God who values connection, relationship, and community.

And, it turns out that if Jesus had simply gone into Jerusalem on a donkey, no one would have cared. It was the people showing up with Jesus who made the difference. They saw what he was doing, they participated, they were excited, they wanted to be part of the God’s way and wanted out of the Empire’s way. And it was the number of people who showed up who made it so dangerous. Jesus was killed for leading a violent revolt against the Empire. The problem is that he didn’t lead a violent one. Palm Sunday says he did lead a protest though, and maybe it was a bit of a revolt, and the people came and the Empire was threatened.

It can be easy to debate the relative value of protest, but the response of the Empire seems to indicate that they’re threatened by them. There is some base awareness that if the people are to reclaim their own power instead of ceding it to the current power structure, that everything could fall apart. And when the people really want freedom, or and end to a reign of terror, or an end to a war…. It matters when people show up.

It mattered when Jesus was riding his donkey, it mattered yesterday, it will matter again. To be citizens is to participate together in thinking about the society we want to live in and who that society benefits. It includes protesting. Thanks be to God for those who can and do. Amen

We just read a very different version of John 11 than you would find in your pew Bibles, or really in any published Bible. It reflects recent scholarship that looks at the most ancient versions of the Gospel of John – which date to 200 CE and contain a lot of errors and scribal corrections. Most scholars date the Gospel of John to 90-100 CE. Thus the OLDEST copy we have the text comes from about 100 years after it was written. And, in 2021 someone looked carefully at a digital copy of that text and noticed that a scribe had messed with the original language.

The messing around essentially ADDED a Martha into a story about Mary and Lazarus. I’ve made copies of a more extensive look at the changes and they’re here: and I’ve read the scholarly article on it, and I’m going to gloss over the details. But the gist is that the Mary of John 11 has a brother named Lazarus and is very, very, VERY likely to be the Mary of John 20 who witnessed the resurrection. That’s the first important thing.

The second important thing, the revelatory one is that the whole story in John 11 is about MARY but for the past 1800 years has been split so that it sounds like it is about two women – Mary and Martha. And to keep us on our toes, the Mary who is a sibling to Lazarus, a witness to Easter, and the foot-washer is NOT the Mary of Mary and Martha in Luke.

As common as Mary is as a name today, so too was it in Jewish circles in the time of Jesus since it is the Greek-version of the name Miriam, the sister of Moses in Exodus. It was a good faithful name for a good Jewish woman.

When we read John 11 in the way we just did, we have Mary saying the words “Yes, Lord, I believe you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into this world.” This is the same Mary who prepares Jesus for his death by washing his feet with her hair – an action of profound faith and humility. This is the same Mary who is called by name on Easter morning when she has shown up at the tomb by herself trying to protect Jesus even in his death.

When one person does all of those things, that one person is a really important disciple. Reasonably, even, more important than Peter whose most significant accomplishment is that in the other Gospels he is the one to first name who Jesus is, to call him the Messiah.

It seems possible, and I’m going to go ahead and say likely, that someone changed the Gospel of John to diminish the role of Mary ON PURPOSE. If they hadn’t, if the text stayed the way it was originally written, Mary would be EVEN MORE important in Christian narrative. And we find evidence that even in the early Christian movement, the radical inclusion of Jesus was being modified to conform more and more with the norms of the world. Which could mean that by 200 some people wanted smaller roles for women, or more authority for Peter, or just… to make Mary a little smaller.

The funny thing, though, is that Peter is a title. Peter was really Simon who was RENAMED after this little exchange: “Jesus turns to Peter and says, “Who am I?” And Peter actually says, You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.” And Jesus turns around and says to him, “You are Peter, upon this rock I will build my church.”1 And PETER is ROCK so Simon becomes “The Rock.”

Well, it turns out Magdalene is a title too, “The Tower.” Almost as if Mary also got a name change when she stated the truth, and Mary became Mary the Tower, Mary Magdalene. In fact, she kinda goes from “Mary the sister of Lazarus” to “Mary the Tower” who is able to see what others miss. She goes from being defined by her kinship to her brother to being defined by her role in the kindom of God. In some of the ancient texts SHE is listed first in verse 5, that it is said that Jesus loves Mary and Lazarus, and it is WEIRD to have the woman listed first unless she REALLY matters.

Mary is the Tower. Peter is the Rock. PERHAPS the suggestion here is that Peter is the foundation on which Mary builds communal well-being??

Mary the Tower does it all. She’s the disciple we all aim to be. She sees Jesus as Messiah, she nurtures him, grieves him, shows up for him, and has a direct experience of the hope of life after death. She continues his work of building up the community. She is the one – in John – who he passes the torch too. I can see why people who thought they wanted to follow Jesus, but wanted to make him a little bit more respectable might want to make her role a little smaller.

But, let’s put her in her place. She’s Mary the Tower, she’s a beloved disciple, she’s a friend of Jesus. She’s so important that her name is changed to reflect her importance in the Jesus following movement. And at the same time, as we’re told a lot of times in John 11, she is a sister of Lazarus.

And, I think that is particularly relevant. This story says she understood who Jesus was first, even as she was grieving. But it also says that when she had lost her last family member, Jesus brought him back. She experienced some of his most profound healing, and it impacted her. She was already beloved. She was already seeing clearly. She was already important.

And this is a story of a transformation in her life. Maybe this is the change that helped her see clearly the path that Jesus was on led to his death. Maybe this is the change that gave her the fierceness to show up at the tomb and offer to carry his body to safety ON HER OWN. This is the story of a woman strong in her faith getting stronger.

This is the story of a woman who thought she’d lost her family getting it back.

This is the story of a woman who thought she’d lost her identity getting it back two-fold. She regains her family and she gains a title in the kindom. Mary, the sister of Lazarus, the Tower.

One of the things I love about Mary is that her family unit isn’t the most traditional. She’s united to her brother, not a husband. Is she young? Is she simply unmarried? We don’t know! But we know her family is her brother and that matters to her!

It sounds a little bit like our social principles acknowledging that family units come in various sizes and forms, and they all matter. I love our social principles, acknowledging that and noting that what matters is how people treat each other in a family. It seems to make space for chosen family and all kinds of family structures. I like that it acknowledges the complications of adoption without judgment, and that as a whole it focuses on good care of children.

I wish more parts of society could be open about families. As we keep learning more about the struggles of our unhoused neighbors, we keep hearing that shelters prioritize married couples and families and dismiss all other forms of family units – even though families look MANY different ways.

AND I love that Mary isn’t a mother, based on what we know about her. I love this because far too often the importance of women is presented as being about our maternal roles. But Mary is the TOWER and the sister, she’s a person and a role model NOT because of who she procreates nor who she offers care to, but because of what she does and what she notices.

All of this suggests that we who follow Jesus – an unmarried Jewish man - follow in the footsteps of those who understood his role first: an idiotic and likely uneducated man named Simon the Rock, and an unmarried woman with profound insights named Mary the Tower. It is almost as if the Jesus movement from its inception did family differently, and let people connect by kin-ship markers of love and faith. They did family through equality and love, NOT power and dominance and that was antithetical to the power structure of the time. Which was really profound in the Roman Empire when the patriarchy functioned through the POWER of families and family dynamics, and EVERYTHING about the Jesus movement threatened it.

Including a woman whose brother died and who Jesus talked to and cared about. One he loved. One who loved him. (Funny, isn’t it, that we don’t know what kind of love. Good ambiguity there.) Mary the Tower. Thanks be to God for her witness, and for the scholar who unearthed it. Amen

1ALL THE MARYS Wild Goose Festival, Closing Sermon, July 17, 2022 by Diana Butler Bass https://dianabutlerbass.com/wp-content/uploads/All-the-Marys-Sermon.pdf

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

The heart of our scripture passage today as I hear it is “Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord.” This is a pretty obvious part of faith – to try to figure out what is pleasing to God and do it. That’s living the life of faith.

And, of course, it is easier said that done. Sometimes we have easy clarity on what is right, what is wrong, what is pleasing to God and what would be displeasing to God. We know we shouldn’t kick people when they’re down, we shouldn’t ignore the pleas of the hungry, and we should take a few breathes before speaking in anger, take the time to savor the good parts of life.

But, truth be told, we don’t struggle with knowing what is pleasing to God when it is easy. Though sometimes we struggle to DO it. We struggle with knowing what is pleasing to God when it isn’t clear.

In my last church I served a church that was basically built for IBM engineers and their families. While there I was given advice about engineers from someone who had managed them professionally. The advice was: if an engineer comes to you to ask you to pick between two options, then just pick one. The premise, I’m told, is that if there was any significant differences between the two choices the engineer would have simply picked the better one. The only reason you’d be asked to decide as their supervisor, then, was if they were entirely equal and thus the engineer was stumped. In that case it doesn’t matter what you decide because they’re equal and what the person needs is a decision so they can move on – preferably done by someone they can blame later if it was wrong. So, I was told, if you trust the engineer, just pick one. That’s what they need.

Clearly, that was very particular to IBM engineers ;)

It is also relevant to the times when we struggle with figuring out what is pleasing to God. If one choice clearly worked better than others, then we’d just make that choice. Or, at least, we’d try to. Discernment is the spiritual activity we engage in when we are trying to do what is pleasing to God and the answer isn’t obvious in advance.

As I examined The United Methodist Church’s words on Military Service, I was struck by how deeply they’re reflective of a need for good discernment. It is abundantly clear that we need good people to serve in the military, including people of faith who do so with their convictions and conscience, and who will seek the well-being of all to the greatest extent of their abilities. It is also abundantly clear that some people of faith are called to refuse military service out of their faith. And the answer is particular to the person, and their faith, and their gifts, and their circumstances, and their callings, and is not the same for different people. Together, as a Body of Christ, and as a nation, and a world we are strongest when we have both people in the military who serve with integrity and people who choose not to serve as a means of expressing their faith.

For some people, knowing where to land on that question is easy, for others it could be the ultimate discernment. But, for all of us, there are times when we face questions of importance where we need to engage in discernment to find our way.

Now, I need to offer a little bit of my own nonconformist framing to this, simply because I am me and this was imperative to my development. For many years when I heard people talk about “finding out what is pleasing” to God, or discernment, or in the words I heard most often “doing God’s will” I thought of it was… well… obedience. My framing was that God – the creator of the universe – had expectations and plans for me and my job was to “discern” what God wanted and then obediently enact that. Which, I’ll be honest, got me to about 30 without significant issues.

And then it became really uncomfortable.

I didn’t like the implications about God and me that came with that framework. I wanted to be more than a cog in a wheel doing what some external being desired of me. And I wanted to fit the framework into the understanding I had of God as compassionate and kind and intimately involved in my life. The framework started to splinter because it didn’t really fit either the God I experienced nor my theology.

As I sat with my discomfort, and engaged in conversations about it, and wrote about it my prayer journal, and generally pondered about it I built a different understanding of what it means to “try to find out what is pleasing to” God.

While I do think of God as Creator, and that is huge in my personal belief system, when I pray I really think of it as becoming aware of the Holy Spirit who is everywhere – in me and around me and in and around everyone else – connecting us and loving us and just being the foundation of love in everything and everyone. Prayer is attending to and bringing my awareness to God who is with me, NOT to God is above me or beyond me.

And that means that discernment – for me – is not about figuring out the will of some OTHER being. Instead it is about listening to God-with-me, who I know through my own body and being, whose wisdom I access through my own. This, of course, has some dangers. The big one is that my own perception bias can impact how I hear God and lead me wrong. However, that’s always true! But, trusting myself as human who is able to to listen to the whisperings of God within is what discernment looks like for me. And it is hard, sometimes, to trust myself to do it. But it feels a lot more real and honest and even comfortable for me than my old framework did.

A few years ago our Church Council created a “Futuring Committee” to consider where our church is headed. We engaged in a process of group discernment. Our meetings were heavy in prayer, and we moved to silence when we got stuck. We did careful thinking and listening, but we also paid deep attention to what delighted us AS A MEANS of knowing what God might be nudging us towards. Eventually, in conversation with the church that went both ways, we landed on a plan to try to use our building as a resource to the community that will also help us build a more financially sustainable future. In specifics, we planned to make our space particularly available to dance and music groups, to increase the use of our space by outside groups (like All of Us in the Pine Room), and to renovate space we aren’t using for people to live – without having to do the development or oversight ourselves.

(Please note that as in any discernment, finding the way is one part and enacting it is a different part and we’re trying but not getting as far as we’d like with using our space for housing as of yet. But we’re still trying!)

I’m still happy with the work we did, primarily because we took a chance in trusting ourselves to be people who could “find out what is pleasing to” God. And, I think we did.

It seems important here to end on some practical notes about discernment. So, here we go.

First important thing to know: emotions are a TOOL of discernment, not a distraction from it. Does something excite you, bring you joy, energize you, delight you? THAT MATTERS!!!! Does something fill you with dread, bore you to tears, elicit disgust, make you recoil? That matters too! At least in my model of discernment, we have to take ourselves seriously as part of the data set we’re working with as we work with God.

Second important thing to know: when you get stuck, get curious. Why are you stuck? What values are in conflict? What is scaring you or holding you back? What would you need to feel more confident about your way forward? Does anyone else know what you’d need to know to figure this out?

Third important thing to know: discernment often involves a lot of time and silence, because sorting through our own emotions and wisdom and sorting what is real from what we’re afraid might be real, and sorting the past from the present, and generally just finding clarity is slow and takes attention and looks like nothing is happening for a really long time until it does.

Forth and final important thing to know about discernment: there are books written on this and practices that people have found really useful. For me, the ones that have helped the most are:

Prayer journaling. That is, writing it all down where the audience is God) which is helpful because I can sort it out as I write it down

Daily examen where you take time every day to notice the best and worst parts of your day, or the parts most and least connected to God, or the most loving and least loving parts and notice the patterns in them over time. (This can also be done with a journal where you write down both the best and the worst and review it on occasion).

Talking things over with those who are willing and able to hold the space for my own wisdom. I’ve most often practices this in Sacred Circles that come out of the Center for Courage and Renewal and Parker Palmer’s teachings, but really this is a Quaker practice with a long and beautiful history.

The real key here is to know that if you want to engage more deeply in intentional discernment, there are resources and you can find them or I can help you and you need not flail on your own!

We are people who are always trying to figure out what is pleasing to God. Thanks be to God for our trying, and our succeeding, and for the resources that can help us along the way. 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

There are 4 really specific pieces of advice in our short scripture reading today and are are more radical than they first appear. Some of you have heard this before, and for you it is a review. Some of you haven’t, and this is new information. Both are good.

When I was a child I was taught that these recommendations were to be a doormat -to allow violence to be done to me and to… well, I guess to suck it up as passively as possible. That’s not what the text says.

Jesus tells his followers to turn the other cheek. Why? Because there was a difference in ways people were hit. Equals were slapped (or punched). Subordinates were backhanded. To be backhanded was to be put in one’s place, and that place was “lower.” To turn the other cheek is to REFUSE the other person’s narrative that you are lesser.

Important note here, only the right hand got used for hitting people, the left hand was unclean. Not because lefties are bad, but because left hands were used for unclean tasks so one hand could be clean.

Walter Wink explains, “This action robs the oppressor of the power to humiliate. The person who turns the other cheek is saying, in effect, ‘Try again. Your first blow failed to achieve its intended effect. I deny you the power to humiliate me. I am a human being just like you. Your status doesn’t alter that fact. You cannot demean me.’” 1 Because if the person strikes the second cheek the only way they can do that is to treat the person as an equal! Which is to say that the Biblical themes that all people are created in the image of God and are beloved by God is the basis of this advice! To turn the other cheek is to refuse the position of subordinate and to reclaim one’s status as a full human being!

Similarly, comes the bit about suing a person for their outer garment. Let’s be clear, only someone who has nothing else would put up their (one) outer garment as collateral. And the Bible knows this well enough that there are repetitions of the law that if an outer garment is taken as collateral it must be returned to the person every night so they have it for warmth while they sleep.

As Wink says, “Indebtedness was endemic in first-century Palestine… It was the direct consequence of Roman imperial policy. Emperors had taxed the wealthy so stringently to fund their wars that the rich began seeking non-liqiuid investments to secure their wealth. Land was best, but it was ancestrally owned and passed down over generations, and no peasant would voluntarily relinquish it.”2 So high interest and high taxes were used to squeeze landowners out of their land and get their land into the lands of the wealthy. Note that Jesus assumes his hearers are the poorest of the poor, the ones whose outer garments are their debt security.

So why does he tell them to offer their inner garment as well? Because it would leave them naked. They couldn’t win in court, they couldn’t change the system, but they could expose it. “Nakedness was taboo in Judaism, and shame fell less on the naked party than other person viewing or causing the nakedness.”3 Thus, nakedness became a prophetic protest! And, it took back power and dignity for people who didn’t have any in the systems of the day.

So, too, is the recommendation to “go the second mile.” The context here is that Roman soldiers could require someone to carry their heavy (65-80 pound) packs ONE mile, but not more than one. And the soldiers were known to abuse this regularly, so there were various punishments for them, although it wasn’t ever clear what the punishment would be it if was violated. Offering to carry it a second mile would take a person whose labor had been forced and give that person back their dignity. The solider wouldn’t’ want the second mile, would have to ask the person not to, would have to acknowledge the person. And meanwhile the person whose labor had been forced would “have taken back the power of choice.”4

The final piece of advice is to give to everyone who asks, which is hard and complicated and like the rest of these deserves its own sermon, but here we are. The gist seems to be that the only way the peasants could survive was if they engaged in mutual support and sustenance.

Taken as a whole, these pieces of advice establish a radical system of nonviolent resistance. They are a significant part of the reason that the first few centuries of Christianity were emphatically nonviolent, and nonviolence was considered the essence of living out Christian faith. But nonviolence isn’t passive, nor powerless. All of this was mean to empower, to connect, to expose, to invert the system.

These are teachings central to Jesus’s third way. That is, NOT violence, NOT passivity, but nonviolence. This is one of the cores of our Christian tradition. And, as we heard in our shared reading of our United Methodist Social Principals, there is now a debate about whether or not violence is ever acceptable and while I think that conversation has immense value, we’re not focusing there today either.

However, it seems worth mentioning that those who believe violence and war are sometimes necessary usually would do so within the confines of Just War Theory which states that before a decision to go to war can be considered justified these conditions must be met:

The war must have a just cause.

It must be waged by a legitimate authority.

It must be formally declared.

It must be fought with a peaceful intention.

It must be a last resort.

There must be reasonable hope of success.

The means used must possess proportionality to the end sought.5

Note that for Christians and United Methodists, stating that Just War conditions have been met and it is thus legitimate to go to war is the most permissive standard within our Christian tradition, and others would say that there is no such thing as a just war, nor any justification for violent action.

Walter Wink is one of the thinkers who lands in that second position, but he points out that there are places where those who believe in just war and those who believe only in non-violence line up:

Both acknowledge that nonviolence is preferable to violence.

Both agree that the innocent must be protected as much as possible.

Both reject any defense of a war motivated solely by a crusade mentality or national security interests or personal egocentricity.

Both wish to persuade states to reduce the levels of violence.

Both wish to hold war accountable to moral values, both before and during the conflict.6

I would suggest for us that those are the principals we use was we make our shared assessments about what our faith requires of us in the days we are living. And, I’m going to go ahead and state the obvious that the current war in Iran does not meet the standards we hold.

Furthermore, the non-profit “Military Religious Freedom Foundation” reported this week that complaints have come in that commanders are telling their troops that the war in Iran is part of God’s plan to usher in the return of Christ.”7 More than 200 such complaints have come in, from more than 40 units (as of Thursday). The first one was. “A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer on behalf of 15 of them.”8

Now, we around here are not well versed in the premise of Armageddon, so let me clarify a few things. The first is that the book of Revelation was written as a letter to support people living the violence of the Roman Empire while trying to live the nonviolence of Jesus. It is written as vision, and with some warping of time to give it deniability as being about the Roman Empire. Some parts of American Christianity have globed on to an idea of a final battle based on Revelation 16:16, “And they assembled them at the place that in Hebrew is called Harmagedon.” That said, while the battle lines are drawn, in the book of Revelation they never occur, and instead Jesus comes in and ushers in the new heaven and the new earth. Which is to say that the WHOLE of “Armageddon” premise is just… made up.

And using those myths to justify war, which is what happens every time the US enters a war in the Middle East, is an abuse of Christianity and Christian tradition to serve the values of the empire. The debate within the Christian tradition is about if ANY war can be justified. What is being articulated to try to motivate our military is a perversion of Christianity that is antithetical to our scripture, tradition, reason, and experience.

Christianity, like other world religious, holds that are people are of sacred worth. We never take killing lightly, and the power of the state to kill doesn’t change that standard. For now, we need to hold firmly to our own tradition, and refute any premise that tries to use Christianity to justify unjust war. We need to hold firm to the sanctity of human life, and commit to nonviolence in all the ways we are able.

We need to live out the love of God we have experienced, and trust that love has its own power. And, while we are at it, The United Methodist Board of Church and Society has some trainings for us about how we can respond with nonviolent resistance like Jesus taught us.9 Thanks be to God for a denomination that helps us know how to follow in the ways of Jesus. Amen

1 Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), p.176.

2 Ibid, p. 178

3 Ibid, p. 179.

4 Ibid, p. 182.

5 Ibid, p. 214.

6 Ibid, p. 224.

7 https://myemail.constantcontact.com/MRFF-Inundated-with-Complaints-of-Gleeful-Commanders-Telling-Troops-Iran-War-is--Part-of-God-s-Divine-Plan--to-Usher-in-Return-o.html?soid=1101766362531&aid=3OTPFAZxIrI

8 https://jonathanlarsen.substack.com/p/us-troops-were-told-iran-war-is-for, accessed 3-

9 https://www.umcjustice.org/latest/lenten-webinar-series-ashes-to-action-lent-as-non-violent-resistance-8953

Rev. Sara E. Baron 

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

 603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305 

Pronouns: she/her/hers

 http://fumcschenectady.org/

I am told that the Ancient Israelite temples were creation themed. I love that. I love how it connects our faith tradition to other traditions that were and are more earth based. I think about a tour I once took of a cathedral in Ecuador where the tour guide pointed out places the builders of the cathedral snuck in their own faith symbolism. The people doing the actual building had not been building of their own free will, and they’d not been converted to the faith that forced their labor. The symbols they added, though, were symbols of Mother-earth. And it is interestingly full circle that the “inserted” symbols were also a part the ancient Temples that pre-date our Christian tradition.

I also love that the Temple was creation themed because I think my own faith is creation themed and I like reminders that my faith is a valid expression of a long standing tradition – since sometimes I get messages that I’m too far out of the norm to count. Knowing God as Loving Creator is the foundation of my understanding of the Divine. Seeing glimpses of God in creation is a constant affirmation of my faith itself. Gleaning wisdom from creation has always been at least as important to me as gleaning wisdom from ancient patriarchal texts (the Bible, I’m talking about the Bible – I love it and struggle with it).

I’ve always read Psalm 121 and resonated with “I lift my eyes to the hills – from where will my help come?” I’ve done that. A lot. When I’m driving on the interstates or country roads, I’m pretty constantly lifting my eyes to the hills and soaking in their beauty and wisdom. They speak to me of God. This is for me a comforting Psalm, a reminder of the ways that Creation speak truths to our souls, an affirmation that God is with us, a reassurance that all will be well.

Which means, if I’m honest, that I love it and savor it and inherently distrust it. Because, dear ones, not all is well and not all has EVER been well. This fact doesn’t even require keeping up to date on the news. So I looked this Psalm up in the Word Biblical Commentary and discovered some new ideas. The first is that there is significant debate if the opening line reads the way I always read it, “I lift my eyes up to the hills – this beautiful piece of creation that soothes my soul – from where will my help come? From the God of creation of course!” OR if it means something more like “I lift my eyes to the hills – those mountains I must climb, where dangers abound in my path, from where will my help come in having to traverse them?”

Well then, I’d always missed THAT possibility. But, its valid. And in both cases the answer is the same “My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth.” Which is kinda great, that whether the hills are soothing or terrifying, the answer is that the God of Creation is with us.

The commentary suggests that in this Psalm the speaker has been at a Temple festival, and has been fed by being in that worshipful place and experience. The festival is ending, and the Psalmist is trying to find a way to live out the wonder of the Temple experience in day to day life. I can’t quite tell why they assume all this is true, but neither can I find a reason to disagree with it, so I’m going with it. The question of the Psalm then is how to trust in God in the day to day, and the Psalmist expresses convictions of how trustworthy God is. That said, I feel like the Psalmist goes overboard. The commentary explains, “Life is full of dangers, but Yahweh’s help is a match for them all. … In practical terms life cushioned from all unpleasantness was never the lot of the Israelite… but believers in any age hear this message deep in their hearts and are encouraged thereby to bear the heat and burden of the day and to sleep with contentment.”1

By the end of that, I hear the famous words of Julian of Norwich, “And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Julian found those words after decades of prayerful consideration of a single deathbed vision. They come out of pain, fear, and isolation to speak to the truth under it all.

Beloveds, there are all kinds of things that are not well. We could spend days making the lists of what is not well. Hmm, maybe months?

And at the same time, God is with us all. They’re both true. The worst things happening in the world, God is with the people experiencing them. They are not alone. Even more so, God is at work to care for God’s people, all of them, all the time. But quite often people get in God’s way.

God may be trying to shade us from the sun, but sometimes people cut down the trees! God has created plenty for us to eat, but we don’t distribute it well. God wants full and abundant lives for all of us and sometimes we humans drop bombs and missiles on people.

And STILL God is with us all.

God, the creator, dreams good dreams for us where we share in the abundance of God’s resources and take loving care of each other. And, in the meantime, in this world we live in, our help comes from God, who made heaven and earth.

Thanks be to God who is always with us. Amen

1Leslie Allen, Word Biblical Commentary Psalms 101-150, ed. Bruce M. Metzger et al (USA: Zondervan, 2002), p. 154

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

Welcome to Lent, let’s talk about the temptations the Tempter was tempting Jesus with. ;)

The last one is obvious, I think. Jesus is tempted with worldly power, and instead chooses Godly power. That one is a big deal, after all most of the expectations of the messiah at that point were for the messiah to restore Ancient Israel to its worldly power. And power over others is highly valued in a lot of places – but Jesus was into the power with, into relationship, into the well-being of the collective – not into using people to benefit himself.

In the middle one we’re told that Jesus is tempted to test God. But that one has never made sense to me. I’ve never had a temptation to test God by engaging in self harm and expecting God to change the rules of physics to protect me. And, really, we’re talking about Jesus here who ends up being killed by the powers of the world, so…. What? My guess is that this is a story of early Christianity, when people had come to believe that Jesus was “special” and maybe even started to think of Jesus as “God” and then thought he’d have temptations to excuse himself from the laws of nature.

But is actually the first one that confuses me the most. The stones into bread one. The idea here is that Jesus has been fasting and he is famished. So the temptation is to … well… eat. To feed his body. To stop the pains of hunger.

Jesus responds that he is in need of God, not of physical nourishment and that’s really lovely and all but the fact does remain that he would have been REALLY hungry. So I got to wondering about this. I started to wonder what would be so bad about breaking a fast with some bread. Particularly if we suspect disbelief and think about it as if Jesus could ACTUALLY make stones into bread. What would be wrong with that?

And then I realized that to make stones into bread to break a spiritual fast would pretty much negate the purpose of the fast. Fasting is meant to be a way of CONNECTING, that every time a person feels hunger they use it to remind themselves to turn to prayer rather than food. But it has to be a choice, simply being hungry and not having access to food isn’t fasting. That’s being hungry, whether the person is spiritual about it not.

In traditions that use fasting regularly, the end of a fast is as intentional as the rest of it. Part of the temptation here is to circumvent the process and meet the bodily need before completing the spiritual process.

But the other thing that occurred to me is that in real life, bread is INHERENTLY communal. To make bread you need: flour, water, salt, and a leavening agent. In the time of Jesus the leavening agent it would have been sourdough. NONE of those ingredients are things that exist in a vacuum. To have flour you need land, and seeds, and time to cultivate and knowledge. You also need a way to grind grains into flour, which is pretty challenging to do. Water required a well in those days in that part of the world. Salt required harvesting and transportation. And sourdough … well, truthfully it dies sometimes and you need someone else to give you some again. Oh, and you need an oven, which is a thing that has to be build, and heated, which requires fuel.

That is a long way of saying – you can’t make bread by yourself. Bread is communal.

Then I got thinking about how it may look like bread is less communal today – after all we aren’t standing around a grinding stone with our neighbors or buying salt from the person who harvested it- but it takes many MORE hands to eat bread today than it did then!

I buy flour in a paper bag from the co-op. So to get it to me involves the co-op, roads, the company that grinds and sifts it, the farmers whose grain they grind, the people who make the equipment the farmers use, the seed companies, the water systems for the land, AND the people who made the paper bag, and the glue. And the paper company, glue company, co-op and flour company are places that have finance departments and HR departments and hire custodians and gardeners. Also, to buy the flour I participate in the finance system of the US, using a card, connected to my bank, all based on the worldwide value of the US currency.

I get water from my tap. Which is a miracle. And involves the city water system, those who maintain it, those who budget for it, the NYS regulations on it, the EPA regulations on it, the lawyer who are suing the EPA to keep regulations on it, the engineers who designed it, the workers who installed it, and the work of the plumbers I call if it goes wrong in my house!

I get my salt from the co-op too, I notice it has a metal spout and think about how many humans’ labor that spout adds. And I think about the work of maintaining the roads to get it to us, and the labor of doing it and the machines required and the labor of building and maintaining and dreaming the machines.

My sourdough I got from my brother’s college roommate’s stepmother, a lovely woman named Kathy who lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, and could trace her sourdough to the time when Russians were in charge of Alaska.

The oven I use … oh my. People designed it, tested it, marketed it, transported it, and installed it. Others had to run electricity for it to work, and people connected my house to electricity and other people maintain the electrical grid. Oh, and the people who created, designed, perfected, transported, and installed the solar panels that sometimes provide the electricity for the house! I won’t go into it but most of the time when I make bread, I use olive oil too, and bowls, and pans, and tools! ;)

So when I “make my own bread,” I’m indebted to the labor of more people than I can fathom. And for those people to do their work, they need others too! Someone helped birth them, someone took care of them as children, people got them the medicine they need, people taught them, people wrote books they’ve read, people acted in shows they like and movies they make sense out of, someone recorded their favorite music, and someone is ready to answer the phone if they call 911. So, by the time we really think about it, the capacity for me to “make bread” requires …. a society.

To eat bread is to be nourished by the abundance of creation, the energy of the sun, the gifts of mother earth herself AND to be nourished by the interconnections of humanity itself.

Which means that magicking stones into bread is skipping out on the people and connections and communal wisdom and societal implications that are actually all a part of getting bread. If you skip out on that part, you’ve taken care of yourself in ISOLATION, taken care of only yourself while bypassing all the people who should be a part of it. You take your needs out of the community you live in. And when you take your needs out, you take your gifts out too, and you aren’t a part of the community anymore. To turn stones into bread is to act as if you can thrive in isolation.

And that’s why one shouldn’t make stones into bread – if one could.

And while we’re at it, stones don’t actually nourish, kind of like the cheap, self-stable food that many are forced by circumstances to rely on. Food that is high in sodium, low in nutrients, specially designed to make you overeat without being satisfied. Stones. And, what our society offers people as “food.” Because each loaf of bread we make is inherently dependent on others, and yet many of the others the bread depends on aren’t able to access good bread itself.

Our Social Principles make a strong point about the importance of local control over food justice. I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways we actually can participate in the systems as justly as possible. This church was an early adaptor of Equal Exchange Coffee, when that was the only way people could access fair trade coffee and ensure that some of the costs of coffee were used to provide for the people doing the work! Now, we’re more able to access fair trade coffee in more places, as it became clear that “fair trade” is something that people want! We don’t want food systems that oppress, food systems that dehumanize, nor food systems that make us sick! We want just systems! We want those who labor to be able to eat – and truthfully, we even want those who don’t labor to be able to eat!!!! We want the abundant resources God has provided in the earth to be used to feed God’s people.

So, I’ve been thinking about where we are able to make a difference in these sometimes really complicated systems of our society. Which means I’ve been thinking about the wonders of food co-ops. When I arrived here I was told about the Niskayuna Co-op by a church member and I’ve loved it ever since. I’m also really excited about the Electric City Food Cooperative that is supposed to open this year. From their website, ““Community-owned grocery stores ... are jointly owned and democratically governed by their member-owners – by the people, for the people.” They operate differently than grocery stores. Co-ops are “where Profit serves People and Planet, rather than the other way around.”

Because, “in conventional supermarkets, financial profit is the bottom line.  In these companies, profits are distributed to shareholders or private owners. For corporately-owned grocery stores, the primary legal responsibility of the business is to generate profit margins to be redistributed to shareholders (typically people who are disconnected from the local community served by the store). Profit margins in grocery stores tend to be low compared to many other businesses and most corporately-owned supermarkets are only willing to establish stores in places where they can be assured that the population’s spending power and trip volume is high enough to generate profit for their shareholders and executives.  They tend to favor car-dominated suburban areas more than locating in urban neighborhoods.”

“Research shows that community-owned grocery stores like co-ops are the best recipe for increasing access to nutritious and healthy foods, especially in areas like downtown Schenectady that have a history of disinvestment and are currently experiencing economic revitalization.  Cooperative management models paired with significant community engagement with local government and nonprofit support make the difference.”

To my delight, it is about to get EASIER for people in our city to access good quality food, that connects us to local food sources, and distributes wealth more equitably! That is, while we can’t solve it all, we can do our best and maybe have the bread we eat that connects us to each other do a little more good along the way. And, more people will be able to access life giving bread. Thanks be to God for every single step towards food justice! Amen

February 22, 2026

The final Sunday before Lent begins is Transfiguration Sunday, when we read one of the Gospel’s versions of the story of Jesus heading up the mountain with his favorite disciples and a transformation happening before their eyes. The story is blatantly placed on this Sunday to give us a foreshadowing of Easter right before we start Lent. It is a story when the truth of God’s work in Jesus shines through.

Most years when I preach on this I focus on the truth that shined through and the disciples’ hilarious responses to it. This year though, I found myself asking, “What was it that helped them gain clarity?”

It was understood in those days that mountaintops were holy places. This was even one of great debates of the time, as the people of God in Jerusalem said God was to be worshiped in the Temple and the people of God in Samaria said that God was to be worshiped in high places. I’ve been on a few mountaintops in my life, and I tend to understand why people find then holy. The views, the distances from normal life, the work involved to get there, the wonder of it all adds up!

Even more so though, I think there is intentionality in this. Jesus is always going off by himself to pray, but in this story he brings Peter, James, and John with him. I think this is a story of the ways that prayer can change us, and in particular of how prayer can free us. We’re bathed in the stories of the world, around here were are bathed in capitalism and competition, consumerism and hierarchy. But when we settle down to be with God, we make space for transformation to happen within us and for God’s stories to bathe us instead.

Prayer gives us time to soak in God’s grace and love, in the inherent value of all people, in the wonders of creation, in the abundance of resources on earth, in the validity of our emotions, in sacred interconnectedness.

We read together the UMC Social Principle on Sabbath and Renewal Time, and I’ll admit that one isn’t as strong as I’d like. I’d prefer if we urged people to engage in a weekly practice of Sabbath keeping, if we celebrated time away instead of just affirming it, and if we named spiritual practices as integral to excellent Sabbath. The good news is that I’m allowed to disagree :)

Of the many gifts of Sabbath keeping, I think the one we need the most right now are the space away from the narratives of the world, and with the narratives of God. This is particularly true because the powers of the world are quite factually trying to drain our life energies away from us and leave us overwhelmed and unable to respond. We need to step away- regularly and with great intention – and be restored.

Now, as a United Methodist in the 21st Century I don’t actually hear a whole lot about Sabbath keeping from others. Ideally, to keep Sabbath is to have whole day every week set aside for things OTHER than production and consumption. We’re not supposed to work! We’re also not supposed to be catching up on chores. (Oye.) We’re supposed to send the time connection – with God, with those we love, and even with ourselves. So Sabbath is practiced in worship and prayer time, taking walks or savoring nature, playing games with those we love, creating something for the fun of it, having a meal or hot drink with people we care about, … anything that feeds our souls, slows the pace, brings joy, re-centers us, builds relationships, and reminds us of the goodness of life itself.

Beloveds, our faith tradition says we should spend AT LEAST one day every week in this way. And, heavens, people choose to ignore this. It is one of the 10 commandments, and it is one of the keys to a full and abundant life and people just… don’t.

Now, if you currently can’t, that’s real. But perhaps like trying to move toward tithing over the long run, I’d invite you to ask what you can do to take steps towards a regular practice of Sabbath. I’ve been interested to note that I usually take Saturdays as Sabbath and I’ve been leading Family Faith Formation every other Saturday since fall of 2021. This is a potential Sabbath violation …. I’m working. But it is work that connects me to others, my family to others, gives me time with my family, and connects us to God. I’ve decided it is well worth it, since I’m not interested in playing Sabbath police but I am interested in things that are good for me and mine! (This example is used to give you freedom.)

Beloveds of God, I encourage you to move more deeply into Sabbath. And, if you have just no idea where to start, our Spiritual Formation Committee has a whole lot of ideas and would be delighted to engage you in it!

Or, more specifically, I’ve been slowly working my way through Tricia Hershey’s book “Rest is Resistance.” She’s working much more on rest than Sabbath but they’re deeply related and she’s brilliant. She asks, “How can we afford to rest when the colonizing Empire we live in daily continues to rage on and grow stronger?… Yes, the system continues raging and destroying but we will not be able to tap into spaces of freedom, joy, and rest by pushing our precious bodies and minds in abusive ways. … Treating each other and ourselves with care isn’t a luxury, but an absolute necessity if we are going to thrive.” (58, 58, 61) And she, the “Nap Bishop” would tell you that if you aren’t sure what to do to start a practice of rest or Sabbath, she’d recommend you take a nap.

Now, it is Black History Month, and while I’ve mentioned that, I haven’t really taken the time to savor it yet beyond our music. I was reminded that Sojourner Truth (1797-1883) was enslaved in Upstate NY, and was an early abolitionist, women’s rights activist, and preacher, one who is known to have preached in United Methodist Churches. (First UMC Kalamazoo, where at least one beloved of this congregation once moved their membership.) She is particularly famous for her speech “Ain’t I a Woman” and I think it is time we hear it in whole:

May I say a few words? I want to say a few words about this matter.

I am a woman’s rights.

I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man.

I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that?

I have heard much about the sexes being equal; I can carry as much as any man, and can (c) eat as much too, if (d) I can get it.

I am as strong as any man that is now.

As for intellect, all I can say is, (e) if women have a pint and man a quart - why can’t she have her little pint full?

You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much, for we cant take more than our pint’ll hold.

The poor men seem to be all in confusion, and dont know what to do.

Why children, if you have woman’s rights, give it to her and you will feel better.

You will have your own rights, and they wont be so much trouble.

I cant read, but I can hear.

I have heard the bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin.

Well if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again.

The Lady has spoken about Jesus, how he never spurned woman from him, and she was right.

When Lazarus died, Mary and Martha came to him with faith and love and besought him to raise their brother.

And Jesus wept - and Lazarus came forth.

And how came Jesus into the world?

Through God who created him and woman who bore him.

Man, where is your part?

But the women are coming up blessed be God and a few of the men are coming up with them.

But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, and he is surely between-a hawk and a buzzard.

[I originally preached the version form https://www.nps.gov/articles/sojourner-truth.htm - but have corrected it based on this https://www.thesojournertruthproject.com/compare-the-speeches/]

I find myself back at the Transfiguration…. That is, I don’t’ think Sojourner Truth could have spoken so clearly the truths of God unless she had taken the time to savor the truths of God. That is, I think she rested, and practiced spiritual practices, and likely took Sabbath. I mean, she’d been enslaved! I can’t imagine she’d want to work more than 6 days a week when she gained her freedom. (Perhaps a thing to ponder in this culture.)

Also, I think the capacity to hear the truths she told, particularly in that time, depended on people being willing to slow down, engage in Sabbath, practice spiritual practices, and get good at listening to God. In a few words, she took down the hierarchies of the day and named God’s desires for the world. People might have gotten defensive of the world as they knew it – unless they’d been bathing in God’s dreams for the world as it could and should be.

In the delight of Sabbath, God plants seeds that change the world, and all we have to do to receive them is simply BE. God has given us gifts, many of them, including the gift of the practice of Sabbath. Beloveds, I urge you, receive the gifts from God for a full and abundant life. You are worth it AND the world needs you whole. Two true things, two reasons to move towards a fuller Sabbath practice. 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

I was a very happy camper, I mean this literally. I really loved going to camp. Well, I really loved going to my local United Methodist Church Camp. I found other camps suspect, and usually thought they did it wrong. I was an awkward kid who struggled socially in school and church camp was the place beyond my home that I was welcomed, loved, and celebrated for who I was! I wasn’t asked to be different. Awkward was OK! At camp, as I experienced it, I was ok.

Which means that I thought that church camp was the best place on earth and church camp staff were the coolest people on earth. [Giggle.] I’m not sure why I’m using the past tense, I may not be a kid anymore but I still love my church camp with my whole being, and I still think camp staff people are AMAZING although I guess I have changed a little. I now think campers are the coolest people on earth.

When I was finishing High School I applied to work on camp staff and to my utter and complete amazement I was hired and got to be a camp counselor and I loved it SO HARD. Then I got to run the counselor in training program (which at Sky Lake we call SNAP for Special Needs Assistant Personnel) and it turned out I loved that just as hard.

I had thought I’d spend time with kids, taking them swimming and taking walks in the woods, and playing silly games. Sometimes I did! But it turned out that Sky Lake has a number of camps for people with disabilities, and I was mostly assigned to them and … well, that’s one of the best things that has ever happened in my life. I mean it, up there with finding my spouse, being a parent, and getting to be a pastor.

To be clear, since “disability” is an incredibly wide ranging description, our “Special Needs” campers at Sky Lake are people with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities. (At least most of the time, few of the campers who come to the camp for those with physical disabilities do not have intellectual disabilities.) And, it should be said, people with disabilities, including those with intellectual disabilities, are a diverse group of people with their own personalities, preferences, pet peeves, and… well, humanity. Broad strokes rarely apply to this group, as a whole people with intellectual disabilities are more diverse than any other group I can think of.

And, at the same time, the experience of working with people with disabilities is profound gift in my life. This, if we’re honest, is about ME even more than it is about the campers. Our campers who are people with special needs are the best teachers I’ve ever had, are some of the longest running relationships in my life, and are sources of pure joy and delight. Without them I would not be who I am, and I would know so much less joy.

When I read the Beatitudes as part of Worship planning, I was trying to find ways to fit together the scriptures and the Social Principles. I was then asking “what Social Principle fits best with the Beatitudes?” and it is my personal bias in life that landed on the answer “People with Disabilities.” Here in the United States with live in unfettered capitalism which is a profoundly broken system that exists at odds with our faith. It is a system of universal competition where people are seen to have value because of what they have and not because they are. It is a system where humanity is secondary profits. It is a system where some people matter and some do it.

Unfettered capitalism doesn’t value people with disabilities. Maybe, sometimes, those of us with vision impairment that can be resolved with glasses can sneak by without much devaluing but most of the time any ways that people are different or any ways that people struggle are seen as LESS THAN.

This is profoundly at odds with the values of the kindom of God where every person is made and beloved by God as they are and where differences are valued and celebrated. It is also profoundly at odds with my life. The Beatitudes invert the values of the world and claim the values of the kindom. The world devalues poor people, honestly in the time of Jesus and today people who live in poverty die younger and struggle more. But God knows that people who live in poverty are blessed and important, loved and gifted, valued beyond measure.

The world devalues meek people, because it values the sort of strength that is the power of violence and obedience. But the kindom of God knows that the meek among us are the ones that offer the best care, the ones on whom the fabric of society depends, the wisest of all. The kindom of God knows that it is the powers of love and relationship that really matter, and where strength really lies.

Similarly, the world devalues peacemakers. War is profitable and fighting over resources is our global norm. But peacemakers live the values of the kindom, caring about all members of the community and seeking win wins and breaking down barriers and letting love shine through.

Within all the inversions of the Beatitudes, I hear the unspoken one “Blessed are those with disabilities, for they know true wisdom and true strength.” When people are dismissed because of their disabilities, there is not only damage done to the one who is dismissed. The whole body that doesn’t get to receive their gifts is damaged by missing out on them.

OK, so this has been a little bit vague so far, and I want to bring it into a more concrete story. The first week I was a camp counselor, when I was green and basically useless, I was assigned to a camp for people with physical disabilities, most of whom also had intellectual disabilities. It was a camp where most of our campers were in wheelchairs, and the pace of camp was SLOW. One of the campers was a man named George who started attending camp in 1973, meaning by the time I showed up on staff in 1999 he had 26 years of camp under his belt.

George was dangerously fond of flirting and women, going so far as to write plays where he saved damsels in distress so that in acting out the play women would give him kisses on the cheek in gratitude. He lived for his one week at camp a year, spending the rest of the year buying treats he could give away during camp. He particularly enjoyed giving out nerds candy because it was a treat and an insult wrapped in one.

George liked to tell jokes but had a really severe life-long speech impediment. So, he wrote down his favorite puns on pieces of cardboard – the joke on one side and the punchline on the other and when he wanted to tell someone jokes they’d be responsible for reading them out-loud and then laughing at them. The jokes remained the same day after day and year after year, so for some of us they got fairly familiar. One of George’s favorite moments of his life was when one of the staff members pretended to laugh so hard at his joke cards that he had to run off to pee before there was a problem. That individual had read them about a hundred times before.

The thing that always amazed me most about George was his patience. One time we were practicing one of his places in preparation for the camp talent show and another counselor asked George if he would like some lemonade. George replied, "spleetd." Fifteen minutes later, and after several attempts at spelling the word for us (he could spell beautifully but his speech impediments made it hard for us to even understand the letters he spelled) we were still lost. Finally, we realized that he was asking us if the lemonade was spiked. He stayed with us, speaking and spelling and trying to be understood for 15 minutes in order to make a joke about whether or not the lemonade was spiked.

I’ve often thought about that moment, and what I might have been like in his shoes. I imagine feeling so frustrated. I imagine giving up. I imagine deciding my joke wasn’t so funny and wasn’t worth the effort. I imagine crying and screaming and shutting down. But George cared about us enough to keep trying to help us understand, and that is a gift I’ll aways be grateful for even if the joke wasn’t THAT good.

In addition to spending 51 weeks a year buying treats to give away, George spent those weeks writing letters to camp staff. He wrote on legal paper, with ¼ inch margins, single spaced, on a type-writer. He put them in envelopes marked S.W.A.K for “Sealed with a Kiss” and they were a godsend for understanding him more than I ever could from spoken conversations. He’d write about friends and family, about trying to cheer people up, about favorite memories – usually of camp- about the stupidity of racism, about his frustration with his body’s decreasing capacities. He also wrote about frustration with a time that someone at camp washed his clothes without asking his permission, which was a fabulous reminder to me about the importance of consent.

He’d send holiday cards, and track my schedule. He liked to call on holidays too, there were a lot of calls on Christmas morning where he’d play his favorite Christmas song “Grandma got run over by a Reindeer.” This was back in the day, so my immediate family also had to learn to interpret his speech well enough to figure out that they should pass the phone to me.

I spent 5 weeks with George in my life, and he died 20 years ago. I think about him constantly and talk about him regularly. His love, his humor, his passion, and his willingness to show me his interior life was a huge part of breaking me free to see the full and wonderful humanity of people with disabilities. He broke my heart wide open.

I struggle to put words to the degree to which my campers matter in my life. Everything I can say sounds too weak or too cliché. I’ve already said that I believe that people with disabilities are blessed. But truthfully I believe that any of us whose lives are touched by people with disabilities are blessed. Blessed are we who get to spend any part of our lives with those who have disabilities, we will never be the same again.

So, if you want to see the kindom of God at play, if you want to experience blessings you never knew you needed, if you want to laugh harder than you thought possible… talk to me at camp. And, I should say clearly again, United Methodist Church Camp also exists for neurotypical kids and they’re great too. The kids and the camps ;)

For many of us, the requirements of Micah 6:8 are profoundly familiar. What God requires of us is that we to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with our God. Justice, kindness, walking with God. To do, to love, to walk.

Micah is one of the prophets, and the prophets are the ones who call out injustice. That is, that most often they speak to the fact that God wants society to take care of everyone, and make sure the hungry have food and the unhoused are housed and the widows and orphans can access life giving resources. Debts should be forgiven, judges should be impartial, there should be no systems of oppression nor domination.

To do justice includes calling out injustice, and acting justly. Paying agreed upon amounts, finding ways to re-balance imbalance, sharing, taking responsibilities seriously. God’s dreams can’t be fulfilled unless individuals and societies DO justice.

I am so grateful that the second one is kindness and not niceness! We are to love kindness. Isn’t that a delight? Not just do kindness but also love it, notice it and be excited by it and celebrate it and embrace it. LOVE kindness. Love how it feels to be kind, love how it feels to receive kindness, love how it feels even to see kindness.

And, finally, “walk humbly with God.” Sometimes I hear this one and the energy is on the “humbly” but I think it should be on the “with God.” Remember we are not alone. Remember that God is with us, and God is powerful, and God is loving, and God is at work doing good in the world, and that we GET TO work with this God of love and also just savor God’s love in our lives.

This week I came across a piece entitled “How to Take Care of Your Mental Health Under Fascism” by Dr. Lauren Fogel Mersy who I know NOTHING about other than she works in Minneapolis as a licensed therapist, but I appreciated her point that we are supposed to oscillate “between coping skills that confront what is happening and coping skills that take breaks for respite.” Every one I know is DOING this, but I – for one – did not have clarity on it is as a model for health. We do the things, whether it is ingesting the news or reading history, calling our representatives, showing up for protests, posting our views, making donations, checking on people… we do the things. Some of the are HARD, they take a lot. (And, for me, I mostly mean ingesting the news is hard.) But then we do the other things… we craft or create, we get together with friends, we play and eat, we do yoga or mediation or puzzles, or watch or read something escapist, or sing, or get exercise or simply pray.

And we go back and forth.

We confront what is happening and we feed our souls. That is, we do the important things, and we do the other important things. And within this we do all the things: we do justice and we love kindness AND we walk humbly with God and it is all in there.

The work of coping skills that confront includes so many of the things we’ve been doing. For me, it helps to connect this with the work of doing justice. And, as we know, sometimes the justice loving requires Civil Disobedience. Jesus did it, and sometimes his followers need to as well, because God’s commandment to love our neighbors take precedence over obedience to immoral authorities. And thanks be to God that our denomination names this important truth.

There are astounding stories these days of the many ways that doing justice is happening. Have you heard the stories of people in Minnesota protecting their neighbors by standing watch over schools and then the stories they tell of other people bringing them coffee, or handing them 3-d printed whistles, or just showing up to keep them company for a bit? People who are doing front line work are doing their work supported by others doing different work and together whole communities are holding strong in the face of unrelenting pressure from the domination system.

The people who do the best organizing are the ones who know the power of art and music and culture to strengthen community and commitment. Singing together matters, beauty matters, COFFEE matters. (Huh, it is almost like churches do know a thing or two about bringing people together!)

The work of coping skills that offer respite connects really well to loving kindness as far as I can tell. Loving kindness for others AND for ourselves. The inspiring stories, noticing the wonder, and of course the imperative escapism of zoning out.

I’ve been loving kindness by noticing good things. When the news troubles our souls, it can be far too easy to focus on the horrible and horrifying things around us. But when we are looking for them, we are able to see that there is an abundance of good too.

This week I’ve been noticing snow removal. This is might sound trivial, but let me explain. I now walk a 5 year old to and from school every day and it makes me very attentive to conditions of the sidewalks. In my neighborhood most people put forth a decent effort and that’s great, but usually a few houses along our route… well.. don’t and it turns out that the ease of the route is really impacted by whether or not EVERYONE has cleared the sidewalks.

This week is the first big snowstorm since we started walking and the sidewalks were in much better condition than usual. This surprised me, and I paid even better attention and found signs that neighbors were taking care of each other. Snowblower tracks flowed continually from one property to another. Rock salt color also crossed property lines. And, my personal favorite right now is the house on the corner across from the elementary school where a 5 foot high pile of plowed snow creates a barrier from exiting the sidewalk… and the people from that house broke through the mess on one side (outstanding work that) and then used their snowblower on their LAWN to create a path around the insanity snow pile to let kids get to school safely. (Please note my child climbs over this pile, but I appreciate the path nonetheless.) Collaboration, creativity, and care are visible on our city sidewalks!

The third piece of what is required of us is to walk humbly with God. That one doesn’t show up in the therapists model, probably because she wasn’t aiming her words at a spiritual community. For me though, the capacity to do justice and the attention to love kindness come out of my walking with God. God holds me and upholds me, makes space for my anger and fears and joys and delights, offers me patience and hope when I run out, and more than anything just is WITH me reminding me that I’m not alone and we’re not alone in the work we do. We’re not alone in doing justice, God is with us sanctifying and strengthening the justice we do. We’re not alone in loving kindness, God is with us sanctifying and strengthening the kindness we love.

God wants full and abundant lives for all people. That’s why we work for justice AND why we love kindness. And that’s why we stay connected to God in prayer and worship, ministry and study, in savoring quiet moments and the wonder of music and art.

We are asked to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God. That is, we are called to confrontation and respite. So, in case I haven’t been clear enough yet, truly dear ones, oscillating between confrontation and respite is IMPORTANT, do both and don’t judge your needs for balance. I’m pretty confident God doesn’t judge us for needing respite. Thanks be to God. 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