Month: February 2024

First Congregational Church UCC in Auburn, MA, February 25, 2024

Genesis 17:1–7 When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you and will make you exceedingly numerous.” Then Abram fell on his face, and God said to him, “As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.

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.

In February 1943, Langdon Gilkey was an English teacher at the Yenching University in Beijing China.  World War 2 had begun fifteen months ago, making it impossible for him, or for many other foreigners, to return to their native countries. Everyone had scuffed along right where they were, but in February, things changed.  The land was under the control of the Japanese army, and they wanted all the foreigners gathered together in one place, under tight control.  And so began a sobering journey for Gilkey.

Along with around 1500 other missionaries, teachers and business people, husbands, wives, children from teens to infants, they traveled by slow train to a city in Shandong Province where they were confined in a former mission compound.  There was not enough room for everyone, there were barely any facilities – few beds, no extra blankets, not enough water for flush toilets or daily showers, inadequate kitchens to cook, no refrigeration to keep the food safe, and for that matter, not enough food.  If you’re like me and don’t quite know where Shandong Province is – well, it’s just west of Korea, at about the same parallel as where the Olympics took place a few years ago.  And those stories about how cold that part of the world is in winter?  They’re true.

Langdon Gilkey came to the camp an ordinary cultural Christian, not particularly interested in the details of the faith, pretty much convinced it was largely irrelevant in a world where people now knew to work together for the best for everyone.  

He believed we’d grown beyond the foolishness of greed and self-interest, that sin was an old fashioned concept.  

And then he was asked to serve on the Housing Committee for the Internment Camp.

Because of the hodge-podge way people had entered the camp, some had much more space than they absolutely needed, while others did not have enough.  Too often there were families with teenagers who had two rooms, while families with toddlers had only one.  This was enormously challenging for the parents of the littlest ones – one 8×12 room in which to do everything…  The building committee came up with a plan to redistribute space – in fact, they came up with two plans to do so – and each time, to Gilkey’s astonishment, the plans were rejected out of hand by those who would lost space.  

He could not understand it.  The plans were good, they were fair, they were “right”.  These were good people; why can’t they see what needs to be done?

He brought the problem of space to four families, of whom he wrote:  “None of them is a troublemaker or uneducated.  …they’re all respectable.. and as moral as they come, just the kind that would support any good cause in their communities at home.”^[1]

Not one of them agreed to share their space or make any changes.  One husband and father threatened to sue him, after the war, if he persisted in insisting on this change.  Even the missionary family refused to cooperate.  The Housing Committee had to finally go to their Japanese captors and ask them to force people to agree to the changes.  Only under compulsion were people willing to help each other out.

He wrote:  . . . I began to see that without moral health, a community is as helpless and lost as it is without material supplies and services.^[2]

Why are we here?  Because, like Langdon Gilkey, we’ve come to realize that the world doesn’t work on the basis of good will to all people.  

We’re here because we’ve come to realize that without the power and leadership of God, without the example of Jesus Christ, without the urging of the Holy Spirit, we’d find it enormously difficult to live in a way which nurtures community, builds up our world, brings justice and mercy to the downtrodden.  

We’re here because without God, our lives would be only about me, myself, and my immediate family, and that’s not how we want to live.

God gives us church as a place to try out living by faith.  As Gilkey discovered, living a moral life isn’t so easy when our choices are limited.  In Shantung Compound every time someone got more, someone else got less.  There was no “more” for everyone, and so it seemed as though life was really about “less” for everyone.  

Knowing the right answer to the question of how to live isn’t simple, or obvious, or easy.  

Yesterday morning I conducted a funeral for Win Bigelow, long-time member of our church, and in the course of the service we heard read First Corinthians 13.  

I was struck by this phrase:  “if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing”  and it occurred to me that the God whom we follow says that love is more important than faith.

So the first thing, the primary thing, the foundational thing I know about God is that for God, love is the most important thing.  It is love which can bind our world together, even when we cannot agree on the details of faith, and from that truth, all else proceeds.  

The covenant God makes with Abram is built on love, not on power or control.  It is a model for us of how the world could be… built on love, designed for justice, open to mercy.

What God is calling us to, this life based on love, focused on justice, is not something that will happen at some unknown time in the future, not something that we should just sit patiently and wait for.  It is something that is right here, right now.  Jesus said, “the time is fulfilled , and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe the Good News.”  

This is good news.  We are not stuck here, in the midst of a world filled with tears, wracked by terrible news from one day to the next, horrified by yet another large-scale killing at a school.  

We serve a God who calls us, now, to action. 

We serve a God who calls us to stand up for those who are alone, to stand with those who seek to change our world for the better.  

We serve a God who promises that we will never be left alone in disaster, promises that it is love which is the foundational principle of our world.

And that is the Good News for today.

Amen.

© 2024, Virginia H. Child

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^[1] Gilkey, Langdon; Shantung Compound, Harper & Row, New York City, 1966, p. 82.

^[2] Ibid., p. 76.

First Congregational Church in Auburn UCC, February 18, 2024

Genesis 9:8–17:

Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark.^,* I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh, and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”

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 year, when I was a student at Andover Newton, then located on a hill in Newton, MA, we had a snow storm.  Well, we had snow storms most years I lived on campus, but this one was unusual.  In my memory, it came in April, much later than we had any right to expect.  In fact, the lilacs were in full leaf when the snow came.

As often happens, it was that nasty wet heavy snow, the kind that destroys backs when you shovel, the kind that is already half melted into water before it hits the ground, the kind that – last week – turned into ice in the night after the snow.  

You can imagine what happened.  The leaves on the shrubs and trees held that heavy snow until they couldn’t.  And when they couldn’t carry the weight, couldn’t bend, they broke.  Our huge, lovely lilacs … all broken branches on the ground.  Now, lilac being lilac, they came back, but I doubt that even now they’re quite as spectacular as they had been.

They couldn’t bend far enough to bear the burden.

Chris Mereschuk, the author of today’s meditation, reminds us that that rainbow was the sign of a covenant between God and all humanity.  Now, covenants are a special kind of agreement, not a contract, enforceable at law, but more of a mutual agreement with God.  When a group of people covenant to be a church, they create a church by the covenant.  When two human beings marry, they create a family by covenant.  And one of the things to understand about covenants is that they are flexible, they are made with the ability to bend to the changes of life.  

Bending, then, changing direction, is part and parcel of our life together.  Bending, understanding that the ways we’ve been going, the paths we have travelled for so long, no longer meet the needs of our world, is essential if we are not to break apart by those needs.

When I was a kid, when I went to visit my grandparents in the summer, we’d all go to church together every week.  And we always, always sat in the same place.  You do that, right?  Always the same place… sometime after my grandmother died, the church remodeled, took out all the pews and re-organized the space.  New paint color, new carpet, new pews, new layout.  And one of the major reasons for the change was the recognition that they needed to have a central aisle for weddings.  The old-fashioned, two-side-aisle layout, no longer worked.

Well, maybe it was just all the mothers of brides on the committee who wanted that change, but they made the changes, and the literal fabric of the church bent in a new direction.  And it is true that if your young bride has to go to another church to have a central aisle, she’s less likely to bring her family back to the home church…

My aunt was on the redecorating committee… she told me they argued about everything, including that center aisle, but came together to make the church work for a new generation.  They did not let disagreement keep them from doing what they believed would work best.

Now, I’d love to talk about fixed pews and the virtues of other seating options, but that’s not what this sermon is about.  I want us to keep focused on the importance of being willing to bend, because it’s bending to the changes in our world that is on my heart today.

It’s not been that long ago that when a woman came to church, she wore a nice dress, heels and gloves.  No woman wore slacks to church, right?  The world has changed.  And we have bent with the change.

It’s not been that long ago that if we had a child who had cognitive issues or maybe cerebral palsy that the world said the best thing was for them to automatically go to custodial care.  I’m not just talking about severe limitations or dangerous behavioral problems, but everyone.  Today, our world’s acceptance has changed.  We have bent with the change.

Now, bending is not easy.  Often it means letting go of the set-in-stone habits of the ages, turning away from what we’d learned as children was the right way to be.  It’s hard, but it’s also good.

Sometimes the changes we bend to are just things like colors or clothes, maybe they’re challenging, but on an every-day level.  But the more important things we need to bend to meet are often much more difficult.  They challenge the assumptions of our lifetimes.

One of the most challenging opportunities we face today is understanding how, for so long,  we firmly closed our eyes to the way Black people experienced life in our country and how different it is than how white people experience life. Just yesterday, I was reading a report that grew out of a study to see where we use our cellphones.  Cellphone locations can be tracked anonymously by using the weather apps or map apps like Google Maps.  It turns out that while tracking how long we wait in line to vote, it became clear that the “wait times were longer in African American neighborhoods than in other places.”^[1] Maybe that seems like a little thing, but everything that makes it harder to vote discourages people from voting, and we have begun to learn to ask why it should take longer to vote in African American neighborhoods than in white ones and who benefits by keeping Black people from voting.

In our world, more and more every day, we are opening our eyes to realities that are way different than the reality in which we’d assumed that all of us live.  We’re coming to understand that what we believed about the justice of our world, was at best incomplete, that the ways justice fell short of our ideals was and is embedded in our expectations of right and wrong.  

There are other things we need to bend to, other new paths to follow, but, for today, this is what I want you to remember.

God is always with us.  From time to time, in order to keep up with God, we need to allow ourselves to bend to new ways, different understandings of our world.  Some bendings are to pick up new good things, some are to bend away from old, even evil things.  Every bending is intended to free us and our world to a deeper understanding of God’s love.

Some of those changes may seem simple, others will seem impossible… but with God nothing is impossible.  This Lent, open your minds, your eyes, your hearts, to our world, and to the ways we are called to bend to serve it.

Amen.

© 2024, Virginia H. Child

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^[1] https://religionnews.com/2024/02/16/how-many-mormons-are-actually-in-church-every-week-in-the-us/?fbclid=IwAR2A5EsiHji2Eu04AcC6cUi58JtPHnxar3rLuMyCxPHify8CQIv8b4HvX3g

First Congregational Church in Auburn UCC, February 11, 2024

1 Corinthians 9:24–27: Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air, but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified. 

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 Apostle Paul was one of the great leaders of the nascent Christian church.  It could be said, quite accurately, that Jesus gave us the picture of what a good life, a Godly life, looked like…. and Paul worked out how to make that happen in a sustainable way.  If you think about it in today’s terms, it would be as if Jesus had the great new idea; Paul took that idea and founded a great company that changed the world.

But Paul didn’t know everything.  He was a man of his own time.  That means he came at faith out of his own experiences.  He was born and raised a Jew, active and committed to his faith.  He was born and raised a Roman citizen…. which in that time, meant he was a member of the upper side of the merchant class.  He was a solid citizen, but not a wealthy one; he made his own living, making tents.  He was a man, with all the assumptions that society then gave to men….  All this means that the people around  him saw Paul as a respectable, successful person with influence and power.  Now there were limits on that power.  He may have been a Roman citizen, but he wasn’t Roman.  Being Jewish meant something when he was with other Jews, but it took something away when he was with Romans. None the less, he led with confidence.

But, as I say, he didn’t know everything.  

Today reading from 1 Corinthians is a good example.  Paul wants us to work hard toward the goal; he wants us to know that following the Christian path is sometimes really hard.  But in using this “it’s a race” model, he’s saying that only one person will win the race.  True enough, for races, but not the least bit true when it comes to faith.

And, while that might sound like a little thing, it’s really key to understanding our way of life.  

Because God isn’t calling only the “winners”.  God calls all of us.

I have a friend who runs marathons.  She works hard at it.  Trains every day.  Eats the right foods.  Has a coach, a team of friends with whom to run, and does all this while teaching full time at her college, raising a family, volunteering at her church.  She loves to run; in fact a couple of years ago, she was ill and unable to run, and it was just so hard for her.

But she doesn’t run to win.  She runs to do her best.  

That’s what Paul is missing.  We don’t run the Christian race to win; we run to do our best.

Back in the dark ages of time, I learned this lesson at the Chester County 4-H Fair.  I was entered in the Guernsey calf competition, and I had a calf — actually by that time an almost-grown-up calf —- who had every good chance to win.  And winning was something I’d rarely experienced, not because my calf wasn’t good, or because I hadn’t done a good job of showing her, but because a girl just a year or two ahead of me in the club had the world’s greatest cow.  Elsie Dodds won every show she was ever in because that cow was fantastic.  It was discouraging.  I’d go into the competition hoping for reserve grand champion, because there was no way I’d beat Elsie.  

But Elsie wasn’t at this show.  And I saw my path clear to winning it all.  Imagine how crestfallen I was when, instead of winning the blue ribbon, I found myself part of a group, all of whom won blue ribbons.  I was astonished, and — honestly, angry — all the way home, barely able to listen to my father who was explaining the Modified Danish Judging System to me.

I was angry and I was wrong.  Because what the Danish System did was make it possible to really see how many of the entries approached the ideal dairy cow.  If you had a first rank entry, you were placed in the first rank.  More kids got rewarded for their hard work, instead of feeling like they were losers because there was always someone better ahead of them.

fwiw, I looked Elsie up on the internet; she’s in her eighties these days, still raising Guernsey cattle, still winning at shows…. some things never change.

So, here’s the lesson for us today — don’t worry about being the best in everything, because being a Christian isn’t a competition that only one of us will win.  Concentrate on that other kind of being best — being the best person you can be, today.  Maybe tomorrow will be different.  But make today the best day it can be.

And don’t wait until tomorrow to make things right.  Jesus told a great story about a farmer (I’ve always heard that his nickname was Bigger Barnes), in Luke.  Here’s how it goes:

“The farm of a certain rich man produced a terrific crop. He talked to himself: ‘What can I do? My barn isn’t big enough for this harvest.’ Then he said, ‘Here’s what I’ll do: I’ll tear down my barns and build bigger ones. Then I’ll gather in all my grain and goods, and I’ll say to myself, Self, you’ve done well! You’ve got it made and can now retire. Take it easy and have the time of your life!’

“Just then God showed up and said, ‘Fool! Tonight you die. And your barnful of goods—who gets it?’

“That’s what happens when you fill your barn with Self and not with God.”

This is all part of being a real church, a church that is a community of people — all aiming to be the best they can be, helping one another get there, reaching out and sharing love with all our world.

So run your race, not to be “the best”, but to do your best.  Let love be your watchword, today and always.

Amen.

© 2024, Virginia H. Child

First Congregational Church UCC in Auburn, MA, February 4, 2024

I Corinthians 9:16-23 (Message)  I’d rather die than give anyone ammunition to discredit me or impugn my motives. If I proclaim the Message, it’s not to get something out of it for myself. I’m compelled to do it, and doomed if I don’t! If this was my own idea of just another way to make a living, I’d expect some pay. But since it’s not my idea but something solemnly entrusted to me, why would I expect to get paid? So am I getting anything out of it? Yes, as a matter of fact: the pleasure of proclaiming the Message at no cost to you. You don’t even have to pay my expenses!

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.

Saint Paul wasn’t always the best writer in the world….and this is a great example, where even the best translations can’t make it clear.   Paul is trying to help people understand why he does what he does – boasting, which is the Greek word, just doesn’t work in our minds – it means something else to us.  So, listen now to this version, as translated by Presbyterian pastor and scholar Eugene Peterson, as he worked to move from what the Greek says to what it meant for his congregation in suburban Baltimore:

I’d rather die than give anyone ammunition to discredit me or impugn my motives. If I proclaim the Message, it’s not to get something out of it for myself. I’m compelled to do it, and doomed if I don’t! If this was my own idea of just another way to make a living, I’d expect some pay. But since it’s not my idea but something solemnly entrusted to me, why would I expect to get paid? So am I getting anything out of it? Yes, as a matter of fact: the pleasure of proclaiming the Message at no cost to you. You don’t even have to pay my expenses!

What Paul is trying to say, and what Peterson makes clear is this:  when we live the Christian life at our best, we are not doing it to make points with the world.  We are doing what we do because we can’t not do it, because we’ve gotten it, because we now know that what we’re doing, how we live, is more important than anything else in the world.

But why does he say this? Why is it so important that we know he wasn’t telling us about Jesus to make points, get ahead, maybe rake in a good offering?

Here’s at least one reason:  Paul is telling the world about a God whose foundation is love.  

Think about it.  Some people thought that the way you got good things from God was by making offerings. And if your offering was good enough, pure enough, expensive enough, then God would give you want you wanted.  You know how this works…. In our world, we all know about bribes.  

Down my way, with the continuing challenge of the bridge on 195 going towards Cape Cod, we’re hearing more than usual about bribes…. Did they happen this time?  Is that why the bridge failed?  Every time, any time, something like this fails, someone’s going to be asking about bribes.  Any time, all the time, when someone looks to be getting better treatment than you’d expect, someone of us will wonder if there wasn’t an exchange, a quid pro quo, going on.

Paul teaches us, however, that our God loves us as we are.  We do not need to pay God off to love us.  That truth is the foundation of our world.  It underlies every single thing we do every day.  Because God loves us, even before we do anything, we reach out in love, without any expectation of a quid pro quo, without any need for payment.  We love others because God loves us, and we love others the way God loves us – freely, without compensation, without earning any points for what we do.

Now think about this.  Because we know God loves us before we’ve even thought of God, we aim to create communities where all have equal standing.  

Because we know God loves us before we know God, we aim to create marriages where both spouses are equal.  We do not believe that one member of the marriage is in charge of the other.

Because we know God loves us first, we work to be communities where all people, regardless of their political beliefs, financial standing, age, ability, ethnic background, immigration status, gender, affectional preferences, or marital status are welcome, equally loved, equally honored.

We don’t succeed, of course.  The world, never mind you and I, is not yet perfect.  But that’s our goal.  God loved us, so that we would share that love with all the world.

I say that we don’t always succeed, that sometimes we don’t even try, because it’s important to remember that we,  and our world, are works in progress.  This is really important.  If we thought where we are was all there was, that this is as good as it can get, we’d give up.  And that would mean, even if we continued to come to church, that we really would have given up on Jesus.

Last week, a friend sent me a video of a toddler taking their first steps.  I know you have seen this – if not the very first steps, then for sure sometime in those first days – the kid has a vaguely astonished, bemused look on her face, like “what the heck is this that I’m doing?” as she lurches across the floor.  From time to time, she falls forward on her outstretched hands, and she bounces back up to keep on going.

The first time your toddler gets up on their feet, they’re not very good at it.  It’s kind of mind-boggling, however, how quickly they get better and better, and how much fun they have with this new ability.   

We’re like that toddler, except old enough to whine about how hard this is, or to wonder if crawling really wasn’t good enough – is this effort necessary, we might ask.  What if we just get one of those creepers they use to work on cars?  We’ll move just as fast with less effort.  It’s only $30 and comes in a nifty lime green.

Sometimes, we’ll do almost anything to avoid change and effort, even by getting something as absurd as using a $30 creeper to avoid having to make the effort to learn how to walk…..

Now, that’s so absurd that no one is really doing it – and this is, I want to add, not about actually not being _able_ to walk, but about being unwilling to put in the effort to move from crawling to upright standing and walking.

But it is kinda what happens with us when we’re being challenged by some new growing edge.  Sometimes the work – maybe physical work, but as often emotional work, of growing into a deeper way of living – is just really hard.  And there’s such a temptation to just step back and take a shortcut.

This past fall, a very conservative evangelical preacher named Alister Begg, was asked, on his radio show, whether or not it was permissible for a devout conservative Christian grandmother to attend the gay wedding of her granddaughter.  Begg asked if the granddaughter knew that her grandmother thought what she was doing was wrong.  Yes, grandma said, she knows where I stand, where I believe faith requires me to stand. Then, said Begg, you should go to the wedding, out of love for her granddaughter.

Now, I’m not going to discuss gay weddings, because this isn’t really about that.  It’s just the occasion for what’s turned into a real fight for Alister Begg.  So many of his conservative co-believers were upset that he told the grandmother to attend the wedding out of love, that they cancelled his radio show and he’s under personal attack.

Begg is in line to lose a lot of respect in circles that matter to him.  And so far, he is saying that he believes that love is more important than anything.  Every temptation is before him to step back from what he believes, to preserve his acceptance, to keep on benefitting from his importance, and he says, “no, that’s not right.”

We all get tempted from time to time to step back, even highly respected pastors.

But that doesn’t mean we’re failures; it simply means we are human.  And as human beings, we are able to get up off the floor, like that teetering toddler, and try again — because we are God’s hands in this world.  

We are called to make God’s welcoming love to everyone we know, in the communities where we live and work.  Because God loves us unconditionally, always, and for ever, we can get up off the floor and go at it again, every day getting stronger in our faith, clearer in our purpose, and more and more loving.

May it be so.

Amen.

© 2024, Virginia H. Child