Month: September 2023

September 24, 2023  First Congregational Church UCC, Auburn MA

Matthew 20:1-16 Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?. So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

(The Message)  “He replied to the one speaking for the rest, ‘Friend, I haven’t been unfair. We agreed on the wage of a dollar, didn’t we? So take it and go. I decided to give to the one who came last the same as you. Can’t I do what I want with my own money? Are you going to get stingy because I am generous? Here it is again, the Great Reversal: many of the first ending up last, and the last first.”

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

God shows no partiality.  
God shows no partiality.  
God welcomes each of us, as we are, when we come. 

God does not judge us on what we’ve done, or how well we’ve done it.  
God does not welcome us onlyif we’re good enough.
God does not welcomes us only if we’re Red Sox fans.
God shows no partiality.

But we do. We show partiality all the time.

We give raises to those who work harder.  

And we generally think that if we work harder we’ll get more. We think we get what we earn.  

Certainly the vineyard workers thought that way.  It’s pretty clear that they all thought that the longer they worked, the better they’d be paid… or to turn it around… the first ones in knew they’d get a dollar a day, and so they assumed that the workers who came on board later in the day would get less money — start at noon, perhaps make 50 cents, start just before quitting time, well get a dime, or even a nickel.  

But then quitting time comes, and it doesn’t quite turn out the way the workers expected.  They all get the same wage, whether they worked 8 hours or 10 minutes.  Now this is good news, right? If we understand that the master of the vineyard is God, and we are the workers, some early, some late, but all loved and accepted it’s great news.

And at the same time, it’s challenging news.  Because, you know, it looks exactly as if some are getting more than others.  Turns out, the Bible tells us, it’s all in how you look at things.  Because, as it turns out, we don’t all start from the same place.

When I was in high school we lived in south Florida, where my father managed a 1000 cow dairy farm.  Two crews of men worked eight hour shifts to milk the cows twice a day.   The men were from southwest Georgia, from a world where children routinely dropped out of school after the first or second grade to go to work in the peanut fields.  

Their children rode the same school buses that my brother and I rode.  We went to the same schools.  Sometimes, especially in elementary school, we sat next to each other in class.  

But when it came to picturing our futures, we did not start in the same place.  My father had been a school teacher, my mother was a nurse.  They both read books for work and for pleasure.  

Their parents didn’t read at all.  None of the adults had gone beyond third grade.  My parents expected me to go to college.  Their parents expected them to get married by ninth grade.  Though it might look as though we’d had an equal start, and had equal futures, it wasn’t so.

Look back at our Gospel story.  On the face of it, some people were enterprising and came to work bright and early, ready to go.  And some slept late and didn’t show on time, some didn’t make it until late in the day.  So, the obvious thing is that some were honest, hardworking and on time, while the others were lazy, maybe even sleeping it off.  And maybe that’s true.

But maybe it wasn’t, maybe it isn’t.  Maybe our “usual assumption” when we see someone show up late for school, or work, or whatever, is keeping us from seeking the real story.

On my travels between here and home, I’m listening to a memoir by Theresa May, former Prime Minister of England,.  She talks about duty, service, and taking responsibility and one of her examples of this gone wrong happened in 1989, when overcrowding at a sports event in Yorkshire led to the deaths of 97 people, contained in a standing-room only enclosure.  

In subsequent investigations, it became clear that the single most defining expectation of the day was that the fans had to be controlled, that the police expected the fans to cause trouble and any sign of distress would be proof that someone was starting a riot.  

So, when two of the enclosures became so over-crowded that people were being crushed against the fence, the police assumed a riot was starting.  They reacted in fear, not compassion.  When the ambulances finally made it onto the field, some of the attendants  refused to leave their vehicles because they assumed the attendees who were trying to get out of the enclosures would be coming for them.  And 97 people died who should have lived.

An additional 766 people were injured with 300 in the hospital.  Theresa May said there are people who were there that day who have never been able to go back to the stadium, that their memories of the day are horrific. So, probably more than a thousand people had their lives changed in painful ways, because there were people whose assumptions kept them from seeing what was really happening.

It was so hard for anyone to wrap their mind around the idea that the police had let their assumptions govern their response, and were responsible for the deaths that it was 2012 before the truth came out.  And even then, people struggled to believe that the police had lied about what they saw and did.  

Assumptions, incorrect assumptions caused a great miscarriage of justice.

Now – let’s go back to that story of the laborers.  Jesus’ lesson for us – well the first lesson – is that God welcomes everyone, no matter what time of day, what season of their life, they come to follow God.  But in the squawking of those who worked the full day, there’s a gentle push from Jesus to think a little more about the backstory, about where people were coming from, what their lives were like.  

Why did those who came late, come late?  
Why do those who fail, fail?  
When we know the whole story, then we can work to make our world better.  

That’s our calling, to be God’s accepting love in the world.

Today’s lesson is really good news for us and for all the world.  It tells us that not only are we known and loved by God, whether we come to God early or late, but that we are loved no matter where we started our journey, no matter what we’ve lived through, no matter where we come from.  God knows and loves us as we are, where we are.  

And today’s lesson is good news because it helps free us from the assumptions which block our vision, which keep us from seeing the barriers that mar our world.  

Today’s lesson gives our lives meaning and purpose, for this is our work. 
to makes the invisible barriers visible, 
to challenge assumptions that put limitations on some, 
and to share God’s love with our world.

Amen.

© 2023, Virginia H. Child

First Congregational Church UCC, Auburn, MA   September 17, 2023

Romans 14:1-12  Welcome those who are weak in faith but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions. ² Some believe in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables. ³ Those who eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not pass judgment on those who eat, for God has welcomed them. ⁴ Who are you to pass judgment on slaves of another? It is before their own lord that they stand or fall. And they will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make them stand. 

⁵ Some judge one day to be better than another, while others judge all days to be alike. Let all be fully convinced in their own minds. ⁶ Those who observe the day, observe it for the Lord. Also those who eat, eat for the Lord, since they give thanks to God, while those who abstain, abstain for the Lord and give thanks to God. 

⁷ For we do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. ⁸ If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. ⁹ For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living. 

¹⁰ Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? Or you, why do you despise your brother or sister? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God.^,* 11 For it is written, 

“As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, 
and every tongue shall give praise to God.” 
¹² So then, each one of us will be held accountable.^,*

Matthew 18:21-35  Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if my brother or sister sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” ²² Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times. 

²³ “For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. ²⁴ When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him, ²⁵ and, as he could not pay, the lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions and payment to be made. ²⁶ So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ ²⁷ And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. ²⁸ But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii, and seizing him by the throat he said, ‘Pay what you owe.’ ²⁹ Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ ³⁰ But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt. ³¹ When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. ³² Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. ³³ Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ ³⁴ And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. ³⁵ So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

In the Book of Genesis, we hear the story of Joseph, that guy with the technicolor dreamcoat… sold into slavery by his not-so-loving brothers, exiled him to Egypt.  You’ll remember that Joseph didn’t have it easy in Egypt – he ended up for a while in prison, and was in danger of losing his life.

Things then began to go well for Joseph, and he ends up, according to the story, being the chief of staff to the pharaoh.  Wealthy, famous, powerful, and still handsome.  But things hadn’t gone well for the brothers… there was a famine, and they were nearly destitute.  And one day they realized the only thing between them and starvation was their brother Joseph.

But would he help them?  Could he forgive their attempt to kill him, their selling him into slavery, forcing him into exile. Would he forget all the bad stuff?  What would he make them do.

What would Joseph do?  Would he forgive and save their lives?  Or take revenge?

Every one of the lectionary’s lessons for today asks the same question.  What does forgiveness mean in this time, in this place, with this set of people?  Joseph has to figure out whether or not, and how, to forgive his family.  In the letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul asks us to think about how to forgive people who fixate on the smallest things: Who are we to pass judgment on another? He asks, and he’s right… who are we to decide?  (This is, by the way, one of the organizing principles of our kind of church – because we believe that all decisions are best made by groups of people, not one person speaking for everyone else…)

Our Gospel lesson takes the idea of forgiveness another step along the way.©  According to Matthew, Peter asks Jesus how many times he has to forgive someone… as many as seven times? . . . no, Jesus responds, more like seventy times seven.  Even if you forget that in the Hebrew Scriptures “seventy times seven” was their way of saying “forever”, it’s still a lot of forgiving.  It’s a way of saying, “forgiving is our job, our calling”.

And then there’s the story Jesus adds on… the one about a slave who owed a ton of money to his master.  The master forgives him, right?  And then the slave goes out and threatens the people who own him money, even throwing one of them in jail.  The master hears about it, and the forgiven slave finds himself in more terrible trouble.  

Now forgiving is not just an interesting sidebar in Bible stories.  It’s part of our daily life, and not just in the easy stuff.  In one of the papers I read, this week there was a letter to the advice column that went something like this:  Dear Carolyn:  My daughter isn’t speaking to my mother, and my mother is upset.  Mom knows she interfered in my daughter’s family – she  repeatedly let one of the kids do something they just weren’t allowed to do – and Mom says she’s sorry, but she can’t stop doing it.  And so my daughter won’t let her visit, won’t let her around the kids, won’t let her take them for the day.  Mom’s so upset, I just want my daughter to let Mom back in her life; Mom’s getting on, and I wouldn’t want her to die before this is cleared up and no one is angry anymore.

Our faith tells us that forgiving is our business, but there is nothing in the Biblical witness that suggests that forgiveness is connected to giving people permission to do it again.  The Bible’s examples are pretty cut and dried, but no one thinks that when Joseph forgives his brothers, he’s looking to let them kidnap and sell him again.  And the exact problem in the story from Matthew is that the slave who was forgiven, doesn’t take that as a sign to change his ways.

The daughter in the letter from the newspaper – can “forgive” her grandmother, but that doesn’t mean she has to give grandma access to the kids again, not when grandma has said clearly that she intends to continue subverting her granddaughter’s authority with her own children.  

Forgiveness is about our relationship with the person who has hurt us.  We often confuse it with repentance, which is the work the other person does to repair the damage their deeds have caused.  In the newspaper story, if grandma said I’m sorry and I won’t do that again and then didn’t do it again, that would be repentance.  And then forgiveness and repentance together would have created restoration, the rebuilding of a relationship.

Now, here’s the challenge for us… because we have a job to do.  We know what happens when we forgive one another, we have seen what a difference real repentance can make, and how good restoration can be for us and for our community.  Our challenge is to use those tools — forgiveness, repentance and restoration – to make our world better today.

Our world is in a heck of a mess.  And it can be discouraging to see how vile people can be to one another these days. This is one way we can make a difference.  We can, in our own friendships, at work and at school, be people who practice forgiveness, live out repentance and nurture restoration, and as we do it, please God and rebuild our world.

Let’s do it… let’s talk about the places we see problems, and see what we might do to help things get better.  Let’s see where we can practice our faith and make the world better.

Amen.

© 2023, Virginia H. Child

First Congregational Church UCC, Auburn MA, September 10, 2023

Luke 10:25-29 — ²⁵ An expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” ²⁶ He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” ²⁷ He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself.” ²⁸ And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”  ²⁹ But wanting to vindicate himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, our God, our Rock and our Redeemer.  Amen.

It seems to me that all of the Bible, all of theology is something of a commentary on this little story of an interaction between Jesus and the man who was playing “gotcha”… you know, that game where the other person tries to trap you into saying something foolish or embarrassing?

I don’t know what it says, if anything, about me that I’m beginning our work together with a short story and a trick question…. but we’ll see.

I’m going to begin by telling you a little about myself, and why this is, for me, the core of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  And probably I’ll repeat a little that is in the bio in the bulletin, but from a different point of view.

I spent the first eight years of my life in New Jersey, south Jersey.  My mother was raised a Hicksite Quaker in the Philadelphia region, my father was a Congregationalist from Woodstock, right south of us in Connecticut.  We followed the Quaker path in New Jersey.  

Now don’t feel bad if you don’t know what a Hicksite Quaker is… Philadelphia Quakers had a big fight in the early 1800s about how much you could accommodate to the world and they ended up splitting into two branches – the followers of Elias Hicks became known as Hicksites, and the other camp were called the Orthodox.  

Or as we would have put it in my First-day school classes, the Orthodox folks had closed minds and didn’t want to hear about any new ideas.  We each had contempt for the other party; for instance I could attend any church I wanted, except the Orthodox Friends Meeting right around the corner from our house.

In other words, even though I was raised a Quaker, with traditional Quaker understandings about worship, involvement in the world, pacifism, and so on, I was also raised to believe there was one right way to be a Christian, and I was following it.

We moved to Florida when I was in the ninth grade. and that was, for the most part, the end of church for us.  The closest Quaker meeting was too far for us to travel on a regular basis; moreover it was small, had no children, and was largely composed of folks who were wintering in the area.  

In my high school years, I began to examine my faith more seriously.  One of the tenets of the Quakerism I had absorbed was that people were capable of perfection, and that I should be continually working to be more and more Christ-like every day.  You can actually find this in the Letter to the Hebrews, chapter 6, verses 1-3:  Therefore let us go on toward perfection. . . and it’s a key part of Methodist practice as well.  There are ways to explain this – these days Methodists say it describes a process, not a destination, but when I was 16, I was quite literal, and I thought perfection was impossible, if not for other people, then certainly for me.

 I didn’t stop being a Quaker then; I didn’t stop being a Quaker when I joined the Marine Corps, though by then I had decided that if military service was a sin, it was ethically indefensible for me to expect those who served to protect me, while I enjoyed the fruits of their endeavors.  I was married in the Quaker way, in my mother’s home Meeting.

But, some years later, when my marriage failed, and I could not see a future, I walked into the local UCC church in Rutland, Vermont, and there I heard that it was always possible to start again, that failure did not have to define my life.  I joined this church that said there was always more to come, that knew how to welcome the stranger.  I filled my life with friends and there I learned how to be welcoming myself.

It was there in Vermont that I began to really study what it meant to welcome neighbors, to think seriously about what “neighbor” really meant.  Getting active in the UCC meant I met a lot of people from different places. 

Was that Japanese pastor who came to preach my neighbor? Or was he a representative of the evils of the other side in the Pacific campaigns of World War II?  We had members who would not come to church to hear him because he was Japanese.  Was he a neighbor?  Were we being neighbors when we (some of us) would not meet him?

It’s a question which continues to make me think as these years later.  My last church helped expand my understanding of that neighbor, as we not only welcomed the folks you’d expect, but the couple in the corner who couldn’t (literally, could not) stop whispering to each other through the service… and a number of other folks, gay, straight, trans, white, Black, professors, folks who could not read, people who couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, were just different from one another in so many ways.

Through all this I can’t help noticing that when the expert in the law comes back at Jesus, when his first trick question didn’t work, he asks another trick question in order to vindicate himself.  In other words, whenever we start asking that question, just who is it that belongs, who must we welcome, we have to suspect there’s an edge of self-protection, maybe even self-justification, hiding back behind what we’re saying.  Maybe we’re hiding hatred, or anger, or fear.  Maybe we’re just embarrassed because we’ve just acted in a way that says to someone, you’re really not welcome, you’re not ever going to be one of us… and we know it’s wrong, but we couldn’t help ourselves.

And now I’ll bring you back to my first truth discovery.  Jesus loves us anyway.  Jesus loves us anyway.  We’re afraid of the other?  Sure, and we want to work on that fear, but it’s hard.  Remember, Jesus loves us anyway.  All the time, no matter what, we are God’s loved people, and all God asks of us is to love the world around us.  God knows how hard that is, and God understands when we fall short of the mark.

English Bishop N. T. Wright once wrote:  The church is not a society of perfect people doing great work.  It’s a society of forgiven sinners repaying their unpayable debt of love by working for Jesus’ realm in every way they can, knowing themselves to be unworthy of the task.

Every time you hold the door open for someone with a bag full of stuff, you’re showing love to a neighbor, whether or not you know them.  When you smile at the cashier, you’re showing love to a neighbor.  When you say something pleasant to a stranger, when you allow a car in ahead of you when the lane closes on the Pike (and isn’t that hard to do with a smile?)… it those simple ways as well as the more complex, we show love.  

It’s love which turns strangers to neighbors, and that’s what God has called us to do.

Amen.

© 2023, Virginia H. Child