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
To Believe is to Care. . . To Care is to Do 