Month: October 2023

First Congregational Church UCC, Auburn, MA  October 29, 2023

Leviticus 19:1-18 — The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: 

 “Speak to all the congregation of the Israelites and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy. You shall each revere your mother and father, and you shall keep my Sabbaths: I am the Lord your God. Do not turn to idols or make cast images for yourselves: I am the Lord your God. 

“When you offer a sacrifice of well-being to the Lord, offer it in such a way that it is acceptable on your behalf. It shall be eaten on the same day you offer it or on the next day, and anything left over until the third day shall be consumed in fire. If any of it is eaten on the third day, it is an abomination; it will not be acceptable. All who eat it shall be subject to punishment, because they have profaned what is holy to the Lord, and any such person shall be cut off from the people. 

“When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God. 

“You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another. And you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God: I am the Lord.

 “You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind; you shall fear your God: I am the Lord. 

“You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not stand idly by when the blood of your neighbor is at stake: I am the Lord. 

“You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.

Matthew 24: 34-40 — When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, an expert in the law, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” 

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God our Rock and our Redeemer.  Amen.

My Facebook feed is filled right now with pictures of leaves…. First, my friends from northern Vermont, then central Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, then Massachusetts, and so on.  I can watch the southward march of fall foliage without moving from my computer screen.   Just yesterday, I saw my first picture from Pennsylvania…. And at the same time, there are new pictures… this time, moving from northern heights… my friend from International Falls, Minnesota, posted the first picture of snow there about two weeks ago.  And it’s been snowing on Mount Washington, here in New England.  Time is marching on, in the lovely ways we’re used to.  It all feels very traditional, very comforting.  Autumn leaves, pumpkins, hay rides, apple cider donuts… even the promise of snowflakes, maybe by Thanksgiving… or even tonight or tomorrow…. Makes it all seem as though we’re in that right, safe places, that all is well, and will be always.

And that’s all true, and good, tho I’ve always preferred for it to snow later and later, and wish we could make it stay on the grass only.  But that’s not the whole of our world, is it?  It’s such a temptation to so focus on the beauty around us that we block from our awareness, the evil that’s here as well.

But the beauty around us is not some sort of super-sweet frosting intended to blind us to the tastelessness of the cake.  We still have a war in Ukraine.  We still have a war in Gaza.  Eighteen people who were well and happy last Sunday were murdered in Lewiston by a man with an automatic firearm, murdered as he dealt with his own demons, and now he is dead as well.   And there was an incident up at Worcester State yesterday, with shots fired…tho not a mass shooting, it locked the campus down for a while.  People right here in our town are still struggling to pay their bills, desperately searching for affordable homes, trying to balance the demands of work with the needs of children, worrying about this, that, and the other thing.

Sometimes life is overwhelming.  And for many of us, those beautiful leaves are absolutely essential to keep going.. just that tiny glimpse can give us a little strength.  

The thing is, God offers more, much more, than the strength or peace we get from gazing on beautiful vistas.  God offers us a way to order and live our lives so that, no matter what happens, our lives will have meaning and purpose.  That’s what God plans for us, that no matter what we’re facing, we can still be a force for good wherever we go.

The reading from Leviticus lines out God’s plan for us.  It tells us that God intends for us to be holy, and then it describes exactly what it means to be holy.  Holiness, it says, is based on respect for one another.  

Sometimes it’s a challenge to understand exactly why a particular example is included, and that’s true with the one about what to do with meat that’s been offered to God in sacrifice.  Practically speaking, it’s easy to say you don’t want to save cooked meet (without refrigeration) for three days… bad things can happen if you try that, right?  So, I’m thinking that the problem here is that if you consecrate something to God, and then don’t use it in the way it should be (in this case, by eating it promptly), that you’ve spoiled something God had made special.  In other words, it’s about being disrespectful to God by wasting God’s good gifts and in some way, having been miserly in not sharing the meat with others.

God, Leviticus says, honors generosity to others almost more than anything else.  Don’t take all the crops from your fields—leads some for the poor.  Don’t cheat, don’t steal, don’t make fun of people who can’t hear or see… don’t take vengeance…. Love your neighbor as yourself.

So, when – hundreds of years later – someone tried to put Jesus on the spot, tried to catch him out, what he did was quote this line from Leviticus –  “Teacher,” someone asked him, “what is the greatest commandment”  Jesus answered, He said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’  

In other words, live your lives with respect for others, with generosity in your hearts, and you will be holy, as God has made us to be holy.

Jesus provides us with fewer specific examples, and that could make it possible to mistake the way to which he’s calling us.  When he talks about loving our neighbors, he’s not talking about “thoughts and prayers”; he’s talking about concrete actions such as dedicating a part of your money to the use of the church, so that we, as a community, might bring active love to others.  For Jesus, salvation was all bound up with generosity.  When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, we have to remember that, for him, “neighbors” meant anyone you met… not just the folks in your neighborhood, but everyone.

This is how we become holy.  

• We love our neighbors.
• We smile at strangers.  
• We admire squalling babies in the checkout line at the store, knowing how much stress their parents are under, shopping with a toddler.
• We don’t tell mean jokes, or racist ones either.
• We stand up for those who are being ignored because they are different.
• We live with generosity, welcome and love to all the world.

Amen.

© 2023, Virginia H. Child

First Congregational Church, UCC, Auburn MA, October 15, 2023

Exodus 32:1-8 — When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron and said to him, “Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” ² Aaron said to them, “Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters and bring them to me.” ³ So all the people took off the gold rings from their ears and brought them to Aaron. ⁴ He took these from them, formed them in a mold, and cast an image of a calf, and they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” ⁵ When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it, and Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a festival to the Lord.” ⁶ They rose early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought sacrifices of well-being, and the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to revel. 

⁷ The Lord said to Moses, “Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; ⁸ they have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded them; they have cast for themselves an image of a calf and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’ ”

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

So, here’s where we are today in the story of the flight of the Israelites out of Egypt.  They’ve been on the road too long.  They’re cold, they’re tired, they’re hungry.  It’s as if everyone, all at once, has started whining, “are we there yet?”.  And Moses, their leader, has disappeared. Sure, he said he was going to go talk with God, but who does that?  And it’s been so long.

Everyone is nervous, worried, upset.  Stress is everywhere.  They’re out in the desert, lost, don’t know where they’re going, can’t go back to where they were… and they reach out for what always gave them comfort in the past…. Urging Aaron, Moses’ brother, to make them a god, a little statue, a physical representation of all their hopes.  And he does it.

They left Egypt, land of slavery, surrounded by courage.  It was easy to be brave in those first days. It was exciting to get free of that nasty past.  But days passed, and the excitement waned.  The steady walking got old, and boring, and then challenging.  The deep dark of desert nights, so comforting at first, began to be cold, and frightening.  And folks wanted to go home, to the past which no longer existed.

You know what that’s like.  At some level, it happens to all of us.  The excitement of early days turns to routine, and then, boredom.  What happened in the exodus, though, took it a lot further.

The Israelites, for all those understandable reasons, did something that was almost unforgiveable.  They tried to give up their devotion to the God who cannot be seen, is not represented by statues, not even gold statues, for something made in their own image, something easier to live with, something that wouldn’t push them so hard to create a God-formed community.

I got this far before the events of this week, before the terrorist organization Hamas attacked Israel, before more than a thousand people, men – women – the elderly – babies   — died in the first attack… before Israel retaliated, before war descended on the very region in which the Exodus story took place.

That made me think again, differently, about how easy it is to make this story about little things, like being short-tempered or greedy… and to miss that it’s also about the big things, about the evil of war, and the deaths of ordinary, everyday people who were just going about their lives, until death hit them.

Over and over, throughout my ministry, when I’m talking about the Israelites, I’ve mentioned that the land in which they lived, was a crossroads, that they lived in a semi-perpetual battleground.  In those days, it was the Persians or the Assyrians battling the Egyptians to see who would control this wide spot in the road, to keep the homeland safe from invasion.  These days, that fight is still about control of the land we know as Israel, even as we now name the combatants as Israelis, and – often – Palestinian groups.  And it appears that behind Hamas, the terrorist group in Gaza, are those self-same Persians, now Iranians.  Today, the war is not just about controlling Israel, but about killing Jews.

There are a million reasons for the conflicts; I’m not going to even try to explain it all, though if some of you would like to explore it, we can set up a study group.  For today, it’s enough to know that one of the stated aims of Hamas is to kill all the Jews, and they seem to think they’ve made a good start.

I don’t have any good answers to the questions that lie under this attack.  Why do people hate one another this way?  How can people commit such atrocities?  What on earth is the response when people are trying to kill you and all your family and all your friends?

And, maybe most importantly for us, here in Auburn:  what can we do?

The best that I can say is this:  I can ask us each and all not to be distracted from our calling by the hatred we see around us.  We are a community which practices love and acceptance.  

Outside our doors, there are people condemning Jews for their existence; the Jews of our community are upset.  This feels too much like the Holocaust happening again.  We are called to be a comforting presence in their lives, to recognize their pain, their fear, their anger, to be friends with them.

And outside our doors are Palestinian immigrants, people who had nothing to do with Hamas, and who are also being attacked for who they are.  Let us be their friends as well.

In Gaza a war – a vicious, take-no-prisoners, war – is being fought.  That’s there, but here, we have the opportunity to continue to build a community that turns away from dividing walls of hostility, turns towards the creation of welcoming spaces.

Some have made little golden hand-carved gods of all kinds of happenings, events, loses, deaths.  Our God calls us to remember that God is a a God of acceptance, a God of change, a God love.

Let us follow that God, all our days.

Amen.

© 2023, Virginia H. Child

First Congregational Church, UCC, Auburn MA, October 1, 2023

Exodus 20
I am God, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of a life of slavery.

No other gods, only me.

No carved gods of any size, shape, or form of anything whatever, whether of things that fly or walk or swim. Don’t bow down to them and don’t serve them because I am God, your God, and I’m a most jealous God, punishing the children for any sins their parents pass on to them to the third, and yes, even to the fourth generation of those who hate me. But I’m unswervingly loyal to the thousands who love me and keep my commandments.

No using the name of God, your God, in curses or silly banter; God won’t put up with the irreverent use of his name

Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Work six days and do everything you need to do. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to God, your God. Don’t do any work—not you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your servant, nor your maid, nor your animals, not even the foreign guest visiting in your town. For in six days God made Heaven, Earth, and sea, and everything in them; he rested on the seventh day. Therefore God blessed the Sabbath day; he set it apart as a holy day.

Honor your father and mother so that you’ll live a long time in the land that God, your God, is giving you.

No murder.
No adultery.
No stealing.
No lies about your neighbor.
No lusting after your neighbor’s house—or wife or servant or maid or ox or donkey. Don’t set your heart on anything that is your neighbor’s.   ^{(The Message translation)}

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

The Ten Commandments give us a really clear picture of what God thinks a community should look like. 

Except, of course, except that it’s not a drawing but rather words, and with illustrations which made perfect sense two thousand years ago, but are a little obscure today.  So we’re tempted to take those Ten Commandments and make them, actually, into wordy idols, things to be worshipped, carved into stone, words which have no more meaning that anyone can see on the surface. 

When we do that, we miss the entire point of the Commandments.

Because the last thing they are, is some sort of marble monument.  They are, instead, containers of the truth of a life lived with purpose and meaning.  They are a guide, a road map, to that life.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the value of the ethical life this week, after the deaths of two famous baseball players.  Even if you’re not into baseball, these two men were exceptional people, worth remembering, worth honoring.  And each of them lived their lives according to an ethical code, lived their lives so fully that when they died, it was not how well they played the game (and they both were very good at what they did), but how well they lived their lives that everyone is remembering.

The paper said, “people in Baltimore didn’t name their sons Brooks or Robinson because they hoped it would make them world class third basemen, but in the hopes that the model of Brooks Robinson’s way of living would guide them in the same path.

And I think few of us in Massachusetts have not heard about the dedication of Tim Wakefield to the Jimmy Fund, to being a supportive friend to kids with cancer.

We’ve plenty of examples of folks who take their fame to be what makes them worth knowing.  But the Commandments tell us that it’s a way of life that holds the key to real worth.  

The Commandments tell us to be sure we know, name and follow God at the center of our lives.  This isn’t just about showing up here on Sunday morning, but it’s about allowing God to be the balance point in every moment of our lives.  It’s about remembering who we are, about not losing our way in the midst of all the calls upon our time, our power, our presence.

Every other commandment builds on that first one.  It’s all about keeping God in the center of our world.

Don’t let something else sneak in and take over your life.  Today’s translation talks about carved gods because that was a big thing in those days.  But think now about the kinds of things we make into things that distract us from being good, kind, loving, welcoming, honest people – 

Remember that just as the good we do lives long after us, so will the bad.  Let your life be governed by grasping greediness, for whatever – land, money, sex, power – and know that your children, and their children, and sometimes even their children’s children, will pay a price.

Take time off.  Back in the days when this was written, taking any time off was enormously radical; it still is today for many of us.  Now, as then, for some of us we have to work non-stop just to keep even with the bills.  That said, the Commandments tell us that just as the story says God rested after making the world, we also should rest.  If we can’t afford to rest from work for a day, try half a day… or an hour….or, if you’re the parent of toddlers, maybe it’ll only be fifteen minutes in another part of the house… but take some time, rest, and remember that God loves you.

The final commandments lay out the most common ways in which we practice greed or allow anger to take over our lives.  Take care of those who’ve taken care of you.  Don’t let your greed or anger pull you into murder; don’t let yourself slip into illicit relationships, don’t steal, don’t tell lies, don’t get out and outright greedy.

Easy to say, maybe even easy to preach – but you know, and I know, that living this out, fully allowing these values to center our lives is not easy – not to do every day, day in, day out, for the rest of our lives.  The commandments are good news, but challenging news, because they set up a standard that’s not just right, but impossible to live up to all the time.

I can’t speak for you, but I know I can’t do it.  Perfection’s not going to happen in my life.  And that’s why, in addition to the commandments, we have Jesus.  In the letter to the Philippians, the apostle Paul calls upon his readers to live their lives in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.  Repeatedly, he calls upon the members of his churches to live honestly, knowing that when (not if, when) we fall short of the goal, there will we find Christ, ready to welcome us back, ready to help us start again.

The Ten Commandments give us a picture of who God is, what it means to follow God;  the Good News of Jesus Christ also calls us to be imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. (Eph 5)

The Gospel reassures us that we are loved and accepted, as we are, whether we think we are successes or failures, and that when we aim to live as God has called us, we will find a deepness and value in our lives that is indeed God’s richest blessing.

Live as God would have us live.  

Love one another.  

Share that love with our world. 

Never fear, for God’s love never ends.

Amen.

© 2023, Virginia H. Child