Month: November 2023

First Congregational Church UCC, Auburn MA  November 19, 2023

Mt 15:29-39   Then ordering the crowd to sit down on the ground, he took the seven loaves and the fish, and after giving thanks he broke them and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all of them ate and were filled, and they took up the broken pieces left over, seven baskets full.

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.

Most of the time, when we read and study this passage, we want to look at the amazing miracles – the blind, the maimed, the mute, the lame…. All healed.  And there’s no doubt that’s amazing… it’s for sure something we can’t explain, don’t understand, and can’t reproduce here today… not the way Jesus could. 

And sometimes, that inability to make miracles happen today, to cure the sick, restore the maimed, etc., leads us astray… we’ll be saying either “wow, I can’t believe that happened then, because it’s so unscientific, so Jesus must be a fake” or we think, “wow, that church must not be true because they don’t do those miracles”.

I think that no matter which option we choose, when we do that, we miss the underlying story, the one that the miracles illustrate, the one that really matters, the one that can and does happen here and now, maybe even every day.

So, this morning, let’s look beyond the science of those miracles, and think about what the rest of the story has to say to us today.

After the crowds had come and all those people had been healed, everyone was tired and hungry.  Jesus noticed.  And he told the disciples to do something about it.  The disciples were lost for a minute – there were no quick marts, no fast food restaurants, no caterers right down the street.  Then Jesus invited everyone who was staying to sit down.  He blessed the seven loaves, the fish, gave thanks, broke them and shared the food out.  After every one of the thousands there had eaten their fill there were baskets full of leftovers.  Now, that’s a miracle, too.

Jesus gave thanks to God for what they have.  It was the act of giving thanks that made the meal enough.  It was giving thanks that turned a long day and a crowd of tired hungry people into a community.

It is giving thanks, being grateful which is the real miracle of this story.  And it is the practice of giving thanks which can bring joy and satisfaction into our world.

It’s not easy.  

Our world is filled, more than we can remember, with things for which we don’t want to give thanks.  Mean people.  Bullies in school.  General nastiness.  Poor health – even COVID.  Money problems…. The list goes on and on.

Giving thanks is not a fake way to just pretend these bad things are not with us.  They’re here, they’re real, they hurt in all kinds of ways.  What giving thanks in these circumstances can be is a way of declaring that the bad cannot, will not win.  It can be a kind act of defiance.

Defiance, you know, so often is the label we put on that loud “no” or a slammed door.  But that’s not the whole of defiance… and maybe it’s often more like anger that looks like defiance.  This kind of defiance, this kind of saying “thanks” is not about getting back at someone or something; it’s about saying that the bad will not win, that kindness, thanksgiving, love triumphs over all.

Last Thanksgiving my family gathered for a great time together; a few days later, my sister-in-law became ill, and spent most of the winter in and out of the hospital.  Christmas was awful; we didn’t know anything that day, and certainly not how to celebrate with her ill and with an unclear diagnosis.  

She spent something like four days in the UMassMemorial emergency room on one of her admissions, tucked away on one of the side corridors, mostly in dim light, nothing to see, nothing to do, no tv, not even a chair for a visitor – just laying there, waiting for a room to open up.  

It was easy to be angry at UMass for not having a room for her; it was harder to give thanks for that hall space, or for those wonderful nurses, or even for the gruff guy at the entrance who searched our backpacks when we came to visit.  

But we had a choice about which way to look at things.  Most of the time, we chose thanksgiving.  Sometimes we were just angry or frightened, but we found that when we could come up with even one thing (hey the woman at the nametag desk recognized me)…. It was a little better.  And this year, at Thanksgiving, we’ll be glad to all be together once again, glad she’s still with us.

This kind of thanksgiving, I think, is closely related to forgiveness.  It’s not about forgetting the bad.  It’s about not letting the bad control our lives all the time every day.  It’s about recognizing that our world is not perfect, that bad things happen, but good things do as well.  The late Rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, wrote:  “In a world without forgiveness, evil begets evil, harm generates harm, and there is no way short of exhaustion or forgetfulness of breaking the sequence.  Forgiveness breaks the chain.  . . . It represents a decision not to do what instinct and passion urge us to do.  It answers hate with a refusal to hate, animosity with generosity.  Few more daring ideas have ever entered the human situation.”

Thanksgiving does the same thing.  It breaks the chain of anger and frustration which so tarnishes our lives.  It puts things into perspective, allowing us to deal with them without their continuing to break us.  We still name the bad, and at the same time, we can name the good in our world.  

When Jesus gave thanks for the measly seven loaves and just a few small fish, it changed his world.  Let us give thanks this season for the good that has happened in this midst of all the bad…not pretending that bad hasn’t happened, or that we’re hurt or struggling from time to time, but remembering that in Jesus’ name, good has overcome evil for all time.

Amen.

© 2023, Virginia H. Child

First Congregational Church UCC, Auburn MA  November 12, 2023

2 Cor 5:14 MSG

Our firm decision is to work from this focused center: One man died for everyone. That puts everyone in the same boat. He included everyone in his death so that everyone could also be included in his life, a resurrection life, a far better life than people ever lived on their own.

Because of this decision we don’t evaluate people by what they have or how they look. We looked at the Messiah that way once and got it all wrong, as you know. We certainly don’t look at him that way anymore. Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life burgeons! Look at it! All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing. We’re Christ’s representatives. God uses us to persuade men and women to drop their differences and enter into God’s work of making things right between them. We’re speaking for Christ himself now: Become friends with God; he’s already a friend with you.

How? you ask. In Christ. God put the wrong on him who never did anything wrong, so we could be put right with God.

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.

A million years ago, I was on a business trip to central Florida and decided to try meeting an elderly cousin who’d retired there after a career of teaching.  The meeting didn’t go well, for a number of reasons… to begin with, I was late, very late.  And then, at dinner, I mentioned that my father had been an alcoholic, and that had led to his death.  My cousin looked at me with horror, and said “we don’t talk about those things.”

God bless him, he was born more than a hundred years ago, and these days we know that there are some things which benefit from being open about.  My whole family became happier and healthier when we all admitted my dad’s illness, and studied its effect on each of us.  

My family’s not big on change, at least not at first.  My cousins live in a house we’ve occupied since right around 1815; no one has ever suggested it be torn down and something new be built.  On the other hand, they were first in line for electricity and running water, and indoor bathrooms.  Right now, one family occupies the house; but there’ve been times in the last fifty years when there were as many as three families using it… so we’ve learned to change as need calls.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that is that the picture of the cranky, stuck in the mud Yankee, whose motto is “we’ve never done it that way before” is not really true.  We’re glad to change – just not for the sake of change! We want our change to be purposeful, useful.

We live now in a world which is pushing change faster and faster and faster.  Of course, some of that is cosmetic…. Have you seen the cosmetic stuff on HGTV?  White, white walls, shiplap, bookshelves with the books on there backwards, so you can’t see the titles or colors?

Acceptable clothing, hair length or style, tattoos or not, all have changed.  The way people talk, how we interact, the use of the internet… more and more change.

What makes all that change bearable, what helps us differentiate between needed change and cosmetic change, is simply this:  will this change help us share love with our world?

Paul says in today’s lesson, “in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself…”  Paul is asking us to see the world differently because of this… and in the light of that difference – after understanding that with God, everyone is accepted, everyone is loved – to see what changes are part of God’s call to us.

Change – change motivated by God’s claim on us – is an on-going process.  It’s not a “oh yes, sure, let’s change everything right now”.  We don’t all agree on what needs to be changed, and how much, how far to go.  At first, maybe we just need to agree that we’re called to measure how we live against God’s guidance.  If you look into chapter 6… the lesson that follows today’s reading, you’ll see that Paul gets pretty specific about the ways he thinks we should live:

People are watching us as we stay at our post, alertly, unswervingly … 
in hard times, tough times, bad times; 
when we’re beaten up, jailed, and mobbed; 
working hard, working late, working without eating; 
with pure heart, clear head, steady hand; in gentleness, holiness, and honest love; when we’re telling the truth, and when God’s showing his power; 
when we’re doing our best setting things right; 
when we’re praised, and when we’re blamed; slandered, and honored; 
true to our word, though distrusted; 
ignored by the world, but recognized by God; 
terrifically alive, though rumored to be dead; 
beaten within an inch of our lives, but refusing to die; 
immersed in tears, yet always filled with deep joy; 
living on handouts, yet enriching many; having nothing, having it all.

That’s great, though it’s really only the beginning.  Because if we’re doing all those things well, if we’re assuming that we’re ok, if none of this feels in the least challenging, then we’re not putting enough thought into it.  

The author Anne Lamott once said:  “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out God hates all the people you do.”   And if none of those gifts are challenging us, then we too have formed a picture built on our own likes and dislikes… 

One of the small churches I served in my first parish was totally inaccessible if you had mobility issues.  We knew it, and we wanted to do something about it, because we had a member who used a wheelchair and she could not get into the church.  You’ve probably seen churches constructed the way this one was  – there are ways ours is like it – with a totally accessible first (or basement) floor, and the church built on top of the lower level.  Usually, you can figure a way to do a ramp; sometimes the building has a space into which you can add an elevator.  But in this church neither was possible.  The church was perched on the top of a little rise; the land sloped away from the church in every direction, and fairly steeply.  We looked, and measured, and it couldn’t be done.  So, we asked our one congregant to let us know when she was coming to church, and recruited four strong people to carry her up the stairs.  She didn’t come all that often, but we had done the best we could do.

It would have been easy to just leave it there.  But over the years, the church continued to think about how they could make it truly accessible.  Finally the tech came along that allowed them to build an affordable usable ramp and construct a true handicap parking space.  It’s not fancy, but the worship space is now accessible.

You might think this would be a slam dunk, but it wasn’t; for long periods, there were no wheelchair users in the church, and these days, we’re now hearing that we don’t need to make our spaces accessible because “those people” can just watch the Zoom service…

What are the questions we need to be asking?  I’m guessing it’s probably not building accessibility, but I’d love to hear from you – what is on your hearts?   Where do you think God is calling us to go?  Let’s talk together – bug me at coffee hour, drop into the office, send me an email, invite me to lunch – however we do it, let’s begin to see where we believe God is putting a bug in our ears.

Amen.

© 2023 Virginia H. Child

First Congregational Church UCC of Auburn, Massachusetts, November 5, 2023

Psalm 34 — I will extol the Lord at all times.

1 John 3:1-3 — See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.

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.

Andover Newton Seminary founding dean, Sarah Drummond, wrote in her blog this week: . . . how are we supposed to respond to the violence that rained down from Gaza and is now raining down upon it? How are we supposed to survive spiritually amidst all the unchecked and unrestrained hatred our siblings are directing at one another without falling into despair? 

. . . Christianity makes no room for hate. As I said at the outset, I have been hated, and let me tell you: it feels dreadful. Most of those who have expressed they hate me did so based on a decision I made, or that they thought I’d made, or that my institution had made. Whatever action led them to hate me had something to do with them feeling I’d taken something important from them. I’ve been a dean of some kind, after all, for 25 or-so years. Deans suspend and expel students. They make institutional changes that require sacrifices. They lay people off. It’s easier for some to hate me than to hate the nebulous but nonetheless painful losses associated with inevitable consequences or unavoidable change.

The hate I’ve experienced toward others has felt even worse than hatred I have received. In almost every case, it has emerged from a stew of love and fear and devotion. My count-on-one-hand hate-filled moments all resulted from rage toward someone who had hurt someone I care about. I remember the first time one of my daughter’s friends did her wrong, and I was startled by the intensity of my emotions; I’d never before felt such burning.

Jesus knew all about loving people and communities, so he probably understood rage. He never, however, justified hateful action. . . . Impulses to act in hate when filled with rage make sense to me, but as a Christian, I understand acting on those impulses to be morally wrong.

The Christian tradition gives us tools for examining hate, much like engineers give us tools for looking into the sun. Hate is too horrible to regard for long periods of time, like staring into the sun with the naked eye. Jesus told us not to hate. He told us to love everyone, even our enemies. The message can’t get any simpler, and yet loving when a cauldron of rage boils within us might be the hardest thing we’ve ever been asked to do. Good thing Jesus didn’t ask. He simply said, “Follow me.”

We live in a hate-filled, hateful time.  It’s a time that is filled with pain, anger, sorrow.  It’s not just in our political life, though that’s pretty nasty.  Whether at work, or home, or even here at church, we find it harder and harder to take in differing opinions, even when they’re about chunky or plain peanut butter.

That’s what happens when you’re in a time where everything we’ve depended on has changed, and not for the better.  I’m not going to spend a lot of time listing everything that’s changed, but I invite you to make a mental list of the things you’ve noticed…. And then to think about how the changes make existing in our world less sure… and when we’re not sure of the future, when our hope is damaged, then, well our anger seeps out into all our world.  

But here in this place we gather to remind ourselves that our Christian faith, our way of living, is an antidote to the anger of our world.  I don’t mean that here we pretend there is no global warming, no war, no political dissention, no book banning, no…. fill in the blank.  No, we must admit all those things are real, are happening.  But what we have is a way of life which calls us to recognize, share and nurture love wherever we go.

Daily reminders that it is love, not anger, that rules our lives, will help us deal with the world we meet.  

Today is both our Memorial Sunday and a Communion Sunday.  It’s both a time to remember the power of the love which is the best of our personal relationships, and the love marked by the gift of bread and cup.

On this day, I remember the love my grandparents had for their family and their home.  I remember the love I felt as a child whenever my parents and I came to visit, how their home was, in some mysterious way, also my home.  I remember the love my fellow Marines had for their country and their willingness to put their bodies on the line for all of us  I remember the love my pastor had for his family, our church, and God, and how that love changed so many lives.  I remember the love John Lewis had for all humanity and how his love changed the way Black and white live together in our land.

The loves we remember may be as personal as my grandparents, or as far away as the actions of someone you never met.  On this Memorial Sunday we remember those loves, the best that they give.

And on this Sunday we join together in sharing this memory meal, a meal which, through the symbols of bread and cup, ties us together in a web of love which not only bind us together here and now, but is a sign of the love which binds us across the centuries.  When we share in the tokens, eat the bread, drink the juice, we’re sharing in a practice that has taken place for all the centuries since Jesus’ time.  It is as if I am eating with my grandparents, my parents, all who know and followed the love Jesus taught.

And over all, this meal is a sign of our hope, that love will yet still bring us to a new and better place.  Our hope is that we will be blessings to our worlds… to our families, our work, our friends, our communities.

Episcopal bishop Steven Charleston once wrote:

Now is the moment for which a lifetime of faith has prepared you. All of those years of prayer and study, all of the worship services, all of the time devoted to a community of faith: it all comes down to this, this sorrowful moment when life seems chaotic and the anarchy of fear haunts the thin borders of reason. Your faith has prepared you for this. It has given you the tools you need to respond: to proclaim justice while standing for peace. Long ago the Spirit called you to commit your life to faith. Now you know why. You are a source of strength for those who have lost hope. You are a voice of calm in the midst of chaos. You are a steady light in days of darkness. The time has come to be what you believe.

His words are as true today as they were when he wrote them in 2020.  Let us go forth with courage, with hope, with love, today and always.

Amen.

© 2023, Virginia H. Child