#No need among us

[firstumcschenectady]

“Changing the Narrative” based on Deuteronomy 15:1-4 and Matthew 26:1-16

I grew up in the country, and went to college in rural New Hampshire, so when I started interning as a pastor in urban Los Angeles, …. well, there was a big learning curve. I was scared of cities, because they were just new to me, and I found them overwhelming. Los Angeles is a major urban center, and like most of our urban centers it has dazzling wealth and heartbreaking poverty. Homelessness is an especially huge problem in Los Angeles because people spend their live savings to get there expecting to “make it big” by walking down the street and having a producer hire them for a major movie. Also, it isn't cold there, so there aren't networks of code blue shelters.

I worked at a wonderful church, the Hollywood United Methodist Church, and in ways similar to here, the congregation itself was a mixture of the housed and the unhoused, and no conversation about the church happened without awareness of their unhoused neighbors. One of the most distressing moments of my life was in getting to know the unhoused in the Hollywood Church and those who lived around it, and realizing that many of them were the same population as the people I cared for at Sky Lake Special Needs camps. That the most vulnerable among us were living the hardest lives is a lesson I've never gotten over. While I served there we would also go to Skid Row – the poorest part of Los Angeles - and serve meals, an experience that wiped any lingering blinders I had about the justice of unfettered competitive capitalism.

After my first year interning at Hollywood, I went on a mission trip to Cuba with Volunteers in Mission. We started in Havana, and eventually drove east to the site where we would work. After several days on the road I finally realized that I was tense all the time because it constantly felt like we were about to slip into a neighborhood like Skid Row, and I expected the punch to the stomach that I'd experienced in seeing Skid Row. But, in Cuba, everything felt like the neighborhood before you got to jaw-dropping poverty. But you never got to jaw-dropping poverty. This was 2004, and I've since learned that in the early years after the US embargo there really wasn't enough enough food, but by 2004 the island had figured out how to feed and house everyone sufficiently – even though cement crumbled and drug stores were largely bare.

There wasn't much panhandling in Cuba either. There was a little bit, in tourist spots, but our hosts pointed out that because everyone is housed and fed in Cuba, the panhandling was for extra money, not for for basics. I ended up going back to Cuba a few years later, and had very similar experiences. Like the metaphors of a fish being unable to understand water, it took leaving unfettered competitive capitalism for me to be able to see it.

This week I had the chance to attend a conversation led by the Labor and Religion Coalition on the New York State Budget. Many of us are familiar with the Federal Poverty Line, right? And we're also familiar with it's limitations, namely that it is abysmally low and a person or family living above that line will still be struggling to make ends meet. You may already know about the United Way measure “ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed)”, but I didn't. (Can't tell you if I hadn't heard it or hadn't retained it though. Shrug.)

ALICE is a measure of who isn't making ends meet in society. Fabulously, United Way does an amazing amount of work with the data on Alice. For instance, in NYS 14% of people live under the poverty line. Another 30% of people are in ALICE, and 56% of people are “doing OK” and making ends meet. The numbers a bit worse in Schenectady – in our city 49.8 people live below the ALICE threshold, which is to say that HALF of the people in this city aren't making ends meet.

What was particularly interesting in the presentation this week was the visual on recent poverty rates.

Namely, that during 2020, when the government focused on responding to people's needs with stimulus checks, child tax credits, and expansion of SNAP benefits, people living under the national poverty line hit a 20 year LOW.

And since then, the rates have been creeping back up. The work of the Labor and Religion Coalition and their partners The Poor People's campaign includes asking NYS to readjust it's priorities. Stop having regressive tax laws that benefit corporations and the wealthy, and use the income gained to bring greater support for the most vulnerable.

Compared to how we have been operating as a society, this feels like a PIPE DREAM. There so many barriers, so many counter arguments, so much fear of the accusation of “raising taxes.” But then I read the Bible, and I read it with the guidance of Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis and Rev. Dr. William Barber, and God is behind that pipe dream.

Which, for me at least, means it is possible.

Which means we can dream about what it would feel like to live in a society where everyone is housed, and housed adequately. Archaeology suggests that in the first 400 years of Ancient Israelite society – the years before kings – all the houses were about the same size. Which means that society was organized around mutual care for each other and sharing of resources. I've been shocked to learn from the book “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow that MANY ancient societies were really egalitarian like that, including ones with major urban centers, including ones that were stable for many centuries. The ancient Hebrews weren't an outlier.

The Hebrew Bible, though, gets really clear on what is needed to create a society where people care for each other. Everyone needs access to resources – in their case land. Did you know that in Hawaii the native people divvied up the land like really narrow pieces of pie because they knew every group of people needed access to the resources of both the land and the sea? God has worked with peoples in so many times and places to take care of each other, and that means it is possible. Liz Theoharis sufficiently mentions the other rules, “forgiving debts, raising wages, outlawing slavery, and restructuring society around the needs of the poor.”1 That's what we hear in Deuteronomy today. That's what Jesus reflect on in the gospel.

I'm struck by her clear statement that “charity will not end poverty.” It reminds me of the Simone Weil quote, “It is only by the grace of God that the poor can forgive the rich the bread they feed them.” As long as we have a society that makes some people rich BY making other people poor we'll have lots and lots of opportunities for charity, but nothing will change.

Our work, I believe, is the work of “narrative takeover.” For us, it may take some time. There is a lot in this unfettered competitive capitalism that we've been trained not to see, or to think is necessary, or acceptable, and the work we're doing with “We Cry Justice” this year helps us reframe the narrative.

What IS the purpose of a society? If it is to fulfill “there will be no need among you,” then we know what direction to turn in, even it it will be a long journey to get there. It is funny, isn't it? That people know the quote “the poor you will always have with you” but they don't know that the implication of it is “as long as you fail to follow what God is asking of you.”

So I invite us to this dream. What would it be like to live in a society that houses people well, where everyone had enough nutritious food, where healthcare can accessed? Can you even dream it? What are the implications? I think life would be easier for teachers – because so many barriers to learning would be eliminated. If those who spend their lives fighting to make ends meet were able to focus there gifts elsewhere, what could they offer? We would be able to offer great care to those who are aging, those who are young, and those with special needs – none of which we're doing now. People fighting to survive might then have energy for art, music, gardening, and other wonderful things that would enrich their lives and the lives of those around them! I suspect mental health would increase, because the fundamental fear of falling through the safety net wouldn't keep people up at night, and because there would be less stress, and more time for people to connect with those they love. Lives would probably get longer, violence would decrease, ERs would be less crowded, I think there might even be less litter and faster scientific progress. OH, and just that quick reminder- studies say that housing everyone, and feeding everyone, and getting healthcare to everyone would COST US LESS AS A SOCIETY THAN HOW WE DO IT NOW.

Kinda makes you wonder who benefits from how we do it now, doesn't it?

OK, that's probably about as much fish trying to see the water as we can take for a day. But I'd love to hear from you what else WILL happen when we make God's dreams a reality.... let's keep on building that narrative for each other, until we can see the dream clearly and then see the ways we are most gifted at moving towards it. May there be no need among us. Amen

1Liz Theoharis “1: Is Ending Poverty Possible?” in We Cry Justice, ed. Liz Theoharis (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2021) used with permission.

Rev. Sara E. Baron 

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady 

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305 

Pronouns: she/her/hers 

http://fumcschenectady.org/ 

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

January 28, 2024

[amelia-yap]

it's april and they are bloody fools

[postmortemespresso]

school LIs <3

[canisalbus]

i did this quick machete art a couple weeks back, but never got around to showing you so - *hands you pale angsty babygorl*

.

[seawitchkaraoke]

impulse and skizz being like ''yeah people were really sure it was skizz, so weird, no idea how they guessed that'' when at the end of season 9 in his final stream impulse said ''oh new hermits, maybe you know we'll see'' when no other hermit i saw mentioned that possibility at that time at all and he looked at the camera with such a smile like buddy. we know skzz is your best friend. y'all are talking about gem not having a pokerface? where's your's? we could tell you were really happy about something and it was not hard to guess what or who that something was

and then of course all the other clues like all the many interactions with other hermits really solidified it but that one moment at the end of season 9 already had me veeery suspicious

[clear-what-i-was-seeing]

artists have "draw this in your style", i think fic authors should start doing "write this in your style" where a ton of people write the same prompt but all do their own lil interpretations and characterizations and fun dialogue bits etc

[mickeym4ndy]

I always think a lot of Mickey’s trauma that he buried pretty deep will hit him really really hard post canon.

He’s been in survival mode his whole life so he suppressed a lot of what happened to him just to get through life. He didn’t have the option of dealing with it.

Post canon, things will likely finally slow down for him - less money worries because they have their business, no threat of Terry coming after him, not doing many illegal things so less constant fear of getting caught for something and going back to jail.

So he’ll finally be able to relax a bit and, in his mind, start living and enjoying things in life.

But I think once life slows down, all the trauma from his childhood all the way to adulthood will hit him like a truck. Even things he hasn’t thought about in years will really start affecting him.

And I think he’d get frustrated with himself because he wouldn’t be able to understand why he’s doing so much worse when things are finally good.

But that’s actually why he’s doing so much worse. Because he doesn’t need to constantly prepared for something going wrong, so there’s space for other things in his mind, so everything he’s buried would come right to the surface.

I feel like he’d go through a pretty hard time before he can start to get better because he’ll have to face things he’s suppressed head on, because he won’t be able to bury them any more.

[letmetellyouaboutmyfeels]

Xenk: *walking away in a straight line* Ed: What a weird guy. I can't believe I'm gonna sleep with him. Holga: You don't have to. Ed: No, no, I'm gonna.

[nezubean]

Literally no one else will relate to this but

[royalarchivist]

Trust nobody, not even yourself.

[arcadiii]

happy april fools day

[solidwater05]

I thought too hard about Among Us and now I have serious concerns regarding that reactor

[frownyalfred]

“I need you more than want you…and I want you for all time” is such a killer line for a Superbat Injustice fic and nobody will convince me otherwise

[bookshelfdreams]

hey do y'all ever think about the fact that Charles probably has told Edwin about being beaten as a child at some point during their 34 years of friendship? And that Edwin likely never found it remarkable enough to ask further questions because back when he was alive, beating children was completely normal

[thesummerstorms]

I've been dabbling in a project, mostly world building and not actual fic because my brain is a strange creature, but I have decided that in my interpretation of the PJO universe, Athena is ... well a strategist in all things.

Including the creation of her children.

The way I'm envisioning it, creating a child from her own mind isn't really a task she undertakes casually.

Yes, she does it occasionally as a "gift" to a mortal whose mind she admires. There's no romantic or sexual relationship, but it's an intense, consuming relationship all the same.

Children born for that reason (or for just that reason) are rare though. Athena might have many favorites, but she's also proud. Who deserves a child entirely crafted by a Goddess? Only the few.

I think, in a normal decade, the number of Athena campers is actually on the lower end compared to most of the other Olympians.

None of the Campers outside of Athena's own children every really figure it out, and Chiron, who knows, would sooner die than tell them.

But when there are many children of Athena, like there are in Annabeth's childhood, it's a sign that something strange or terrible is coming.

Athena is a strategist, the right hand of Zeus, his favorite child, the one who forsees and attempts to dismantle threats to Olympians' power. She moves the pieces into place without hesitation or sentimentality.

And the easiest pieces to control, of course, would be her own children.

Other demigods have other immortal parents to listen to, no matter how strong their desire for victory or their inherent cunning. Her own children are fragments of her own mind- much more reliable. Much easier to predict.

And if in the years leading up to whatever disturbance she forsees she chooses mortal parents for her children with calculation, with an eye for the skill sets and temperaments she predicts most needing in the dark times ahead...well, the child and their parent should be honored by her forethought.

It isn't even that she has no affection for the parent or child, in so much as she is capable of affection. But Athena is always, always three steps ahead, and her actions always have intent. Her children are no different.

A demigod, ultimately, is a weapon in the hands of the gods. It's best that the ones she chooses are well-crafted.

[betasuppe]

Warden Ingo's very busy crime solving & tossing out bad dad puns every few minutes to keep entertaining the poor teenager who's been dropped a huge destiny in her amnesiac lap, as following this lol.

And also....

Among THEMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!