Month: January 2024

First Congregational Church at Auburn UCC, January 28, 2024

 I Cor 8:1-13 — Now concerning food sacrificed to idols: we know that “all of us possess knowledge.” Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. ² Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge, ³ but anyone who loves God is known by him. 

Mark 1:21-28  — ²¹ They went to Capernaum, and when the Sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. ²² They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes. ²³ Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, ²⁴ and he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” ²⁵ But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be quiet and come out of him!” ²⁶ And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. ²⁷ They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, “What is this? A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.” ²⁸ At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee. 

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.

I bet I’m not the only person who once had a teacher who followed all the rules, all the time.  And if you didn’t have that teacher, the chances are you met a cousin, maybe at the RMV, someone who seemed to think the point of the whole exercise was to see how many times they could send you back to “go” and make – oh, learning, perhaps, or getting that car registered, much less important than the rules that are supposed to protect the goal.

You know what I’m talking about?

This past week, in Bible study, we were talking about the truth that there can be more than one right way, or one right answer…. Now we started with trying to understand why different translations of the one Bible come out differently.  

Here’s an example:  In our New International Version, I Cor 13:13 reads  “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

The Message translation puts it this way:  “But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.”

The New Revised Standard Version says:  “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”

The oldest translation I could find, the Tyndale translation from the 1400s says:  “Now abideth fayth hope and love even these thre: but the chefe of these is love.”

And the King James Version says:  “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”

So, what the right translation?  It depends on what you think is most important – what the ingredients are in your recipe for a good translation. It’s clear in this case that the underlying Greek is pretty simple – every one of the translations comes out saying there are 3 important virtues, and one of them is the most important.

But some of them are based on the idea that we should stick like glue to the King James translation – for them the missing secret sauce is tradition, even when that means the English is hard to understand – what’s that charity instead of love?

For some of them, the most important thing is to make the meaning clear to the reader, and if that means adding words  (hope unswervingly, love extravagantly) then that’s what the translator does.  

At their best, Bible translators try to find a middle point between sticking with the King James or making such deep changes that it feels like it’s been left behind.  At their best, their options are clarified by their love – love for the Bible itself, love for the people – you and me — who will read the Bible.

It’s love that makes the translation work.  It’s love that makes our recipe right.  It’s understanding that the whole purpose of our lives is to live out God’s love here in our community.

Now this isn’t the kind of self-indulgent love that lets us do what we want, when we want it, as much as we can take in.  That’s not love.  That’s just taking the easy way out.  The love God offers us is one that helps us learn the difference between right and wrong, to balance the needs of the individual and the community, to grow together so as to protect the weak and give the strong boundaries.

It’s love when we step away from assuming we know how someone else is, and believe them when they tell us their story.

It’s love when we actively work to move beyond the assumptions we were raised with, to move into the realities we’re experiencing today.  

In our lesson from First Corinthians, the apostle Paul says that knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.  Knowing things can and does help us feel good about ourselves, and knowing more about our world can change us — but it’s love that makes that happen.  It’s love that changes “me” into “us” and makes our world better.

Let God’s love transform us.  Live authentically.  Love extravagantly.  Be a disciple.

Amen.

©  2024, Virginia H. Child

First Congregational Church in Auburn UCC, January 21, 2024

Mark 1:14-20    After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” 

As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.” At once they left their nets and followed him. 

When he had gone a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John in a boat, preparing their nets. Without delay he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him.

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.

I bet I’m not the only person here that remembers those Dunkin commercials – the weary and wearier baker heading off to work in the middle of the night muttering “time to make the donuts”.

He couldn’t sleep late.  He couldn’t even sleep until a more normal time…. Those donuts had to be ready for the first customers … if he didn’t start on time, there’d be no food for the hungry.

In today’s Gospel lesson, we hear a story about time, not time to make the donuts, but another right time to act:  Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God.  The time has come!  Jesus was saying NOW IS THE TIME…. Now is the time to do what needs to be done.  And for an example of what he means, he calls James and John to leave their work and follow him.

It’s time to follow Jesus.

But here’s the question – just what does it mean to get up and follow Christ?

The most radical way to follow Jesus is to get up from our work immediately, but that’s just not practical for most of us, and I wouldn’t want anyone to think that just because we’re not following James and John’s examples, that we’re not following Christ.  There’s more than one right way to follow Jesus.

Shakespeare wrote, in the play Julius Caesar:

There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”

The speaker is Brutus, and he’s talking about the readiness of preparations for a battle.  And I think it’s something we need to hear.  Following Jesus is not just about jumping up and running down the road; it’s about thinking, observing, making plans and following Jesus in ways that make a difference.

That leads us to today.

Today is the day of our church’s Annual Meeting, the time when we formalize our plans for the coming year.  We look at our finances, think about what we need, where God is calling us, and lay the outline of our plans for 2024.  

There’s so much in our world that seems so urgent.  It’s not always clear which thing should get the priority among all those competing calls — me! No Me! == they call out, and what do we do first?  And in the midst of all those voices comes the voice of Jesus saying – well, the Greek word for repent has overtones of “all right!  Let’s get up and going”… this is not some kind of quiet, rational invitation, but more of a raucous call.  

There are times when the call of faith changes our lives right then and there, but there are also times when that change takes longer.  Those decisions are not the end of the story, though.  Over and over, throughout our lives, we need to re-examine and re-make that decision.  From time to time, we’ll need to correct our direction, sometimes in little ways, sometimes in larger ones.  

God’s call is a call to put everything on the line, even those things we’ve been sure we knew.  Everything is open to God’s voice, you know.  God turns the traditional values of much of our society – might makes right, the one with the most marbles wins – upside down.  

Now is the time – the world outside our doors needs the community we offer more than ever.  Our world needs to learn how to live with differing opinions, how to balance the needs of the many with the wants of the few, how to share equitably…. 

It’s time for us to make our donuts.

Amen.

© 2024, Virginia H. Child

First Congregational Church UCC in Auburn, January 14, 2024

Mark 1: 4-11 — John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.  And the whole Judean region and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him and were baptized by him in the River Jordan, confessing their sins. ⁶Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the strap of his sandals. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” 

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.  And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove upon him. And a voice came from the heavens, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

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.

One day my mother served a new, and delicious, soup.  In those days, I loved soup – I still do – and this soup was really good.  It had a lovely, bright flavor, and lots of veggies and other things.  So I asked her what else was in the soup.

She asked me if I liked it, and I said yes. Then, in her wisdom she said, you don’t really want to know what else is in it; if I tell  you, you won’t want any more.  I trusted my mother, and it was years before I discovered the un-namable ingredient – tripe, which, it seems, is the nice name, the cooking name, for cow stomach.  In other settings, tripe is what gets stuffed with oatmeal, sheep innards and onions, and turns into haggis.  Yum, am I not right?

Well, maybe not so much.  But, trust me, pepper pot soup was great.  If it had been spicy tripe soup, I probably would never have tried it.

The name made a difference.

Think about it.  The book of Genesis tells us that God said, let there be light, and there was light.  Once light had been named, it was real; we could see it.  It was the name that made it visible to us.

Names can make us visible; names can make us invisible. 

Now names can be good things… and sometimes, not so much.  During World War I, hundreds of thousands of German immigrants here in the US found that the name German was dangerous.  They stopped speaking German, stopped eating German food, reading German books, sometimes even changed their names to sound more “English”.  My mother’s German family, even fifty years later, downplayed any connection to Germany. They didn’t speak or read German and when they ate German foods, they said they were Amish foods – which they were, because Amish are German.  But they’re also cute, and so it was more acceptable to be Amish, and somehow Amish didn’t read as German — kinda, sorta.  Yes, I know that’s not factual, not logical, but it was acceptable to eat Amish, but not to eat German, food.

We all know it’s less acceptable to be Black.  One of the most painful parts of our lives today is letting those of us who have the best of intentions understand that, no matter what white people thing, no matter how kind and welcoming we are, it is still less acceptable to be Black. Lots of novels have a character of ambiguous ethnicity and one of the plot lines is “is he or isn’t he”.  Even today, if someone’s background isn’t readily apparent, they will have more opportunity, more social acceptance, if people think they are white.  Being identified as Black, named Black, can be difficult, sometimes dangerous. 

When I baptize a child, just before the baptism, I ask the parents, by what name shall your child be called?  Naming, officially naming, gives that child a new and clearer identity.  

But there’s more — because, and this is the point of my sermon – the act of being baptized gives us another new name – Christian. 

The name Christian, the name all of us share, clarifies and defines our lives.  It names us as people who have agreed to live lives of decency and generosity, love and welcome.  

We follow a God who loves us as we are, where we are, and who gives us a way of life that brings us ever closer.

Nadia Bolz-Weber, the Lutheran pastor, writes:  You know the one thing I love most about the Baptism of our Lord text is not just that God the Father says “This is my son, the beloved with whom I am well pleased”, but that God says this – before Jesus had really done anything. Think about that.  God did not say “this is my son in whom I am well pleased because he has proved to me that he deserves it, he has quiet time with me each morning and always reads his Torah and because boy can he heal a leper.”  Nope. As far as we know Jesus hadn’t even done anything yet and he was called beloved. The one in whom the Father was well pleased.  That’s God for you.  And I mean that literally.  That is God FOR YOU.

There’s more to being a Christian than knowing that God loves us, now, before we’ve done anything.  There’s nothing we can do to earn God’s love, but there’s everything we can to in response to that love.  That’s why, sometimes, living up to our name can be challenging.  

Now being known as “Christian” is more than enough, but it can’t hurt to add to that name, to perhaps focus in on one part of living up to the name of Christ.  And that’s why, today, I’m going to give each of you a new name for this year of 2024.  In just a few minutes, after the sermon, the deacons are going to share a basket of words among you. You will be invited to pull out a star, and take the word that’s written on it as a kind of name, a watchword or watch name, for this year.  

I invite you to use this word to help you think about your life.  The words aren’t the names of saints, and they’re not deep theological concepts.  Each word is a facet, a part, of what being Christian is about.  Your word might be joy, or comfort, or peace.  It might be responsibility, or determination, renewal, goodness.  It might turn out to be something you already do, well, or something you wouldn’t normally do at all.  It might be anything, but most of all, it can be a focs for you, a way to think about, reflect on what it means to you, right here and now, to be a Christian.

For we are Christians; we are consecrated by God, and intended to be models of love.  We are supposed to be welcoming, kind, generous.  Sometimes, living up to our name is easy, sometimes it’s difficult.  And sometimes it is dangerous.  As you can imagine, from time to time, ours the sort of behavior that can get angry people, mean people, bigoted people going.  It’s not always a piece of cake to live out our Christian name.

None the less, in our baptism, God claims us and names us.  God gives us a way of life.  God has given us our true name.  That name, Christian, is the name by which we shall be known. . . now and always.

Amen.

© 2024, Virginia H. Child