Month: March 2024

First Congregational Church UCC in Auburn, MA, March 31, 2024, Easter Sunday

Acts 10:34-43

³⁴ Then Peter began to speak: “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism ³⁵ but accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right. ³⁶ You know the message God sent to the people of Israel, announcing the good news of peace through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all. ³⁷ You know what has happened throughout the province of Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John preached—³⁸ how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and how he went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil, because God was with him. 

³⁹ “We are witnesses of everything he did in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They killed him by hanging him on a cross, ⁴⁰ but God raised him from the dead on the third day and caused him to be seen. ⁴¹ He was not seen by all the people, but by witnesses whom God had already chosen—by us who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. ⁴² He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one whom God appointed as judge of the living and the dead. ⁴³ All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”

Mark 16:1-8

When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body. ² Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb ³ and they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?” 

⁴ But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. ⁵ As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. 

⁶ “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. ⁷ But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’ ” 

⁸ Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

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.

There are two important things to remember today.  First, the resurrection scared everyone to death – this was so not what they’d expected.   And second, it freed Jesus’ followers to take up an even more frightening truth – the essential equality of all of humanity.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ was a profoundly disturbing event.  Even then, with whatever science they knew, they knew that dead men do not rise from the grave.  And if that was true of ordinary people, it was even more true for those who’d been crucified.  Death by crucifixion was torture.  And it was a death that tainted everyone who knew and loved the person who was killed.  Only the worst of people were crucified, their families were ruined by it as well.  Painful, shameful, dreadful.  And the crucified stayed dead.

But not this time.  

The women who brought spices to the tomb, spices to anoint Jesus’ body, were rightfully terrified.  When they were able, they told their frightening story to the rest of the disciples, and they were terrified as well.  Scared, hiding behind locked doors, fleeing from Jerusalem.  That’s our disciples in the moments and days after the resurrection.

You know, we think of resurrection as something which happened all at once, and so it did – for Jesus – but for everyone else, it was something they had to grow into.  It took days, maybe weeks, and surely lots of conversations.  When we read all the stories – not just what’s in the Gospels, but also the beginning stories of Acts, we can see it growing in their hearts.  We can see the resurrection becoming a reality for them.  And we can see them changing, changing from frightened people hiding away, into people filled with purpose, with a story to tell.

And that’s where our first reading comes in.

Now, this reading doesn’t happen on the first Easter Day.  But we can be pretty sure that it happened in the early days of the emergence of Jesus’ followers as an organization, in the time when they were working out just what it meant to follow Christ. 

The reading starts abruptly, in the middle of a story that begins like this:  a Roman centurion, a man named Cornelius, has become a God-follower;  he had not formally converted to Judaism, but he lived the essentials, and was well-respected.  One day, he had a vision of an angel, who told him to invite Peter to come and talk with him.  Cornelius sent off his slaves and a soldier to find Peter and bring him to Caesarea, where Cornelius lived.

Remember, this is a time when Jews and non-Jews rarely had contact with one another.  They didn’t share meals, and Jews were strictly limited in what they could eat.  So it’s especially significant that on the day the slaves found Peter, he’d just had a dream where God told him to eat from a collection of ritually impure animals, reptiles and birds.  God was insistent, saying Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.

And it is with that on his mind that Peter goes with the others off to Caesarea… and in the meeting with Cornelius, he says:

“I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every people anyone who fears him and practices righteousness is acceptable to him.

Think about those two lines and what they mean for us:  God said “do not call anything impure that God has made clean”, and Peter preached, “God shows no partiality; anyone who fears him/honors him, and practices right living is acceptable.”

That is the foundation of the Good News of the Resurrection.  Not just that Jesus lives, but that Jesus’ living is the proof positive of the power of God to tear down the walls that divide us one from another.

This is the what for which Jesus has saved us.  
The words Peter spoke turned the world upside down.
No one expected to ever see Jesus again.  He was dead.  He was buried.
And so we think the really radical thing Jesus did was rise from the dead.
But it’s not.

Peter shares the most radical thing about this Resurrection, when he says in every people – that’s everyone, throughout the world, anyone who respects God, and practices righteousness is acceptable.

Before Peter talks, he listens to Cornelius’ experience, his life, his encounters with God.  That’s the first step to destroying those walls…. Listening to those we’ve always thought were outsiders.

In this story, Cornelius is the outsider.  In the world of Judea, he was the stranger, the invader, the occupier, the unwanted, the unaccepted.  Who would Peter be visiting today?  

Think of all the ways we can “not belong”.  Some might seem innocuous… you put sprinkles on your ice cream, instead of jimmies.  Not that important, maybe, but it’s a sure sign you don’t belong here.  A grown-up might not care about the brand of their shoes, but for a kid, having the right shoes, or right clothes can be all consuming.  In some parts of our country, if you go to church you’re not going to belong, while in other parts you won’t belong unless you go to church (and there’s probably a right church, too).  And let’s not touch not belonging because you’re an immigrant, or the wrong race, or gay or lesbian or… well, we really do all know the many ways we cannot belong.

It doesn’t matter which wrong thing you are.  It doesn’t matter which wrong thing is standing outside the family.  What matters is that God has torn down all the dividing walls of hostility.  God says that everyone is welcome.  God has saved us to be the people who do the inviting in, who make this our community one loving space.

There’s a world outside our doors that wants us to live as if some of us are better than others, as if some of us deserve more…. And that some of us don’t even deserve food to eat and a safe place to live.  There’s a world out there that’s built on hatred.  But we live in a world built on love.

We know that other world is wrong.  We know that it’s not right clothes, not lots of money that makes us acceptable.  It is God’s unending love.   We know it’s not power that makes us loved by God, that God loves us at our worst.

And we know that living into that kind of extravagant welcome frightens us just as much as those first visitors to the tomb were scared on Easter Morning.  They didn’t know, didn’t understand, and almost certainly didn’t easily believe what had happened.  But they persisted, as we have persisted over the decades, and like them, we have come to reach out in love, to welcome the stranger, the person who doesn’t dress like us, act like us…… 

God’s love is born in us today as we celebrate the resurrection of God’s Son.  Go forth, and share that love with all the world.

Amen.

First Congregational Church UCC in Auburn MA, March 24, 2024, Palm Sunday

Mark 11:1-11 NIV

As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage and Bethany at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two of his disciples, saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and just as you enter it, you will find a colt tied there, which no one has ever ridden. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ say, ‘The Lord needs it and will send it back here shortly.’ ” 

They went and found a colt outside in the street, tied at a doorway. As they untied it, some people standing there asked, “What are you doing, untying that colt?” They answered as Jesus had told them to, and the people let them go. When they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks over it, he sat on it. Many people spread their cloaks on the road, while others spread branches they had cut in the fields. Those who went ahead and those who followed shouted, 

“Hosanna!” 
“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”
“Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David!” 
“Hosanna in the highest heaven!” 

Jesus entered Jerusalem and went into the temple courts. He looked around at everything, but since it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the Twelve.

Philippians 2:5-11 NRSVue

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, 
who, though he existed in the form of God, 
did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, 
but emptied himself, 
taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness. 

And being found in appearance as a human, 
he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— 
even death on a cross. 
Therefore God exalted him even more highly 
and gave him the name that is above every other name, 
so that at the name given to Jesus 
every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 
and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,

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.

About a month ago, Lizzy the dog went blind.  Her owners rushed her off to the vet and discovered that she had painful glaucoma in both eyes.  Her vision was gone, permanently, and the only way to deal with the pain was to remove her eyes.  It was devastating news to Lizzy’s family.  Lizzy herself was struggling with the sudden blindness.  Most dogs can adjust well to the loss of vision, especially if there’s another dog in the family – they’ll help each other out – but this had happened almost overnight.

Lizzy’s owners made the decision and about 3 weeks ago, Lizzy had her eyes removed.  One of her owners, Pastor Milton Brasher-Cunningham, wrote recently:

When we chose to have our sweet Schnoodle Lizzy!’s eyes removed about three weeks ago it was to alleviate her pain. She had already been blinded by her glaucoma, and the pressure caused by the disease was debilitating. Thanks to the counsel of people we trust, we chose a surgery that felt drastic and then lived through the two weeks of the incisions healing (and the cone of shame). Now we have had about a week and half of whatever this stage is, with all of us learning how to live, and there are new pains to discover, not the least of which is she bumps into everything.

. . . The other two pups have done well with her–until they hit the attention threshold and demand they get noticed as much as the Little Blind One. . . .  Both of them want to make sure we remember that pain in universal; Lizzy! is not the only one in need of comfort and care.

Some pain we live through, some we learn to live with. The pain of the glaucoma and the surgery are gone, but the discomfort of her blindness continues. Now it is part of our lives. As we watch the joyful personality that put the exclamation point in her name re-emerge, I am learning once more that we both shape and are shaped by our pain, whatever it is.  

(Milton Brasher-Cunningham, https://mailchi.mp/donteatalone/mixing-metaphors-the-point-of-pain?fbclid=IwAR0lk9-YYjGWNFaNvwDtX5sYmrKlBXScwx0-ME7Vy3R7eKoKa0TevwrryW4)

Lizzy’s story is not just the story of Lizzy.  It’s our story as well, because Palm Sunday, this week of extravagant celebration is really about pain.  It starts with celebration, but it’s not really about celebration.  It’s not about triumph, not about winning.  It’s about life, it’s about losing, it’s about pain.

Sure it starts with crowds yelling hosanna.  You can just imagine the parade scene:  Jesus is in the crowd.  People are thronged around him, trying to get his attention, trying to give him fruit or some other food, handing him a jar of water or wine to drink, just as excited as people at a Duck Boat parade for the Red Sox after that World Series win twenty years ago.  

Maybe, back in the corner, leaning up against a pillar are two or three of the disciples, just kinda mindblown at how well it’s all gone.  I picture them with silly grins on their face as they see success staring them in the face… you can imagine it, right….that feeling when everything goes well?

And then, well, there’s the rest of the story.  By Friday afternoon, just five days from now, Jesus will have been arrested, tried, convicted and executed.  By Friday night, he will be dead and buried, and the disciple will have fled for their lives, hiding behind locked doors for fear of the Romans.  On Saturday there will be no more silly grins at how it’s all gone.

That’s life, isn’t it?

And although we’d much rather listen to a happy story than a sad one, and sometimes we whine – loudly – about the absurdity of calling Good Friday, good… every once in a while it’s really important to stop and acknowledge the reality that all too often life stinks.

All too often, folks get sick and die, when we’d rather they got better and lived.

All too often, there’s not enough money at the end of the month.

All too often, those nifty new hearing aids  don’t bring us pristine, just like new, hearing.

All too often, our money doesn’t go as far, the government doesn’t do what we think they should.

All too often, the bridge fails, and it just can’t be fixed in a day or a week or even a year.

We ought to know this.  All too often the Red Sox don’t play well, right?  We’re used to failure, and now even the Patriots are going to be teaching us more about failure than we wanted to know.

Marilynne Robinson, the essayist and author, suggests that the sole purpose of the Bible is to help us deal with the pain of life.  I think she’s on to something important.  Our faith is not so much about reciting feel-good stories of redeeming love, as it about recognizing that those stories occur in the midst of pain and betrayal. 

Jesus and his disciples did their best and it all went sideways.  

It wasn’t because they were incompetent.  

It wasn’t because they were greedy, or always fighting with one another.  

If you look at the story of Jesus in the wider context, look at it from the Roman point of view, you really can’t find any way at all that it could have turned out much differently.  No Roman governor was going to welcome someone who looked to everyone as if they were trying to start a rebellion.  And the local civil authorities knew their own positions, their own lives, depended on defending Rome.  Even if they had agreed with Jesus that the world needed turning upside down, even if they’d thought he was only talking about better personal behavior with no politics intended…. There was no way they were going to support him.

Look, we live in a world where we’re all going to die.  I don’t know about you, but I’m not real happy about that.  I want to see my grandnieces all grown up, I’d like to see how they turn out.  I want to know what’s going to happen and I’m betting we’re all pretty much in that same place.

But once we realize that, for each of us, it will all come to an end, we have to work to figure out what makes life worth living….what will we leave behind?

This is the week, in our tradition, when we spend time in the midst of tragedy, in the midst of failure, knowing that death is coming.   This is the week we immerse ourselves in hope, because – this week – hope is all we have.  

So, look forward to the hope that though Jesus is in trouble today, it will be good trouble, necessary trouble, the kind of trouble that changes the world.

Look forward to the hope that though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet.

Listen to these words of hope, written by James Russell Lowell, in the years before the Civil War, when slavery was the law of the land:

Though the cause of evil prosper, 
Yet ’tis truth alone is strong; 
Though her portion be the scaffold, 
And upon the throne be wrong: 
Yet that scaffold sways the future, 
And, behind the dim unknown, 
Standeth God within the shadow 
Keeping watch above His own.

This is the week for hope, hope that next Sunday will come again, bringing love back from the dead.

This week, stand in hope, and look for love.

Amen.

© 2024, Virginia H. Child

March 10, 2024 First Congregational Church UCC in Auburn, MA

Numbers 21:4-9 — ⁴ From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom, but the people became discouraged on the way. ⁵ The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” ⁶ Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. ⁷ The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. ⁸ And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” ⁹ So Moses made a serpent of bronze and put it upon a pole, and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

John 3:14-21 — And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, ¹⁵ that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

¹⁶ “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 

¹⁷ “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him. ¹⁸ Those who believe in him are not condemned, but those who do not believe are condemned already because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. ¹⁹ And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. ²⁰ For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. ²¹ But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”^,*

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

These two stories, one from the book of Numbers, the other from John’s Gospel, come together in ways hard to predict.  After all they were written down at wildly different times, and for very different people.

That kinda makes them a great example of how different stories can work together to tell us something really important.  So it’ll be helpful to have a little background.

Our lesson from Numbers is part of the story of the journey of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt.  We’d love to think that journey, because it’s so central to our faith, so holy, was the perfect example of a perfect journey.  But the Bible never covers up the ways we fall short of perfection, and so, we hear this time, that the children of Israel have once again turned to whining.  If anything goes wrong, you can count on them to whine.  It’s their special gift.

Well, according to this story, the whining didn’t go well.  God gathers up poisonous snakes and sets them loose among the whiners.  People die.  (no, God didn’t really do this –I’m guessing it’s the dream of someone who had had to listen to way too much whining, but we’re asked to take it seriously.)  Moses prays to God; God tells him to take a poisonous snake, hold it up on a tall pole – then anyone who is bitten can look on the snake and life.

Now, don’t get lost in the practicalities.  Just think about this – God suggests to Moses that if the people look on what has made them sick, they can be healed.  It might not work for snakebite, but taking the time to look at what has made us sick, is almost always, one of the right paths to healing.

This is exactly what the medical lab is doing when it tests our blood, or whatever… it’s looking closely at what has made us ill, and once it’s identified, then healing can be helped.

It’s exactly what we do if we engage in therapy.  Understanding, as an adult, what happened when we were children, can be healing.  Understanding the dynamics of a bad situation.

And if you’re trying to figure out why the lawn mower won’t start, the first thing to do is look closely at it, right?

So, though the details of the story seem more than a little odd, the principle the story illustrates is true.  

And it is not trivial.  Sure, sometimes it’s easy to see that what the lawn mower needs is gas, but sometimes, most of the time, figuring out what’s going on is more complicated.  This is particularly true of those things we really don’t see.  If you can’t see what’s wrong, you can’t heal it.

It’s way too easy to keep doing what we always do the way our ancestors always did.  Habit hides all kinds of shortcomings.  God sent us this lesson to remind us that there’s just about always something we need to take a closer look at, not just in our personal lives, but in our social world, our work world, indeed in all our world.

All we need to do to see this wrongness, I think, is to practice listening to people from other parts of our world, from other worlds.  I don’t mean just listening to someone from, say, Samoa.  I mean listening to those right around us.  Here’s what I mean:

Years ago, I was doing an interim down in a church near New Bedford, and was leading a book study with a group of women from the church.  We were a mixed bag – some lifelong residents, some newbies, some Yankee in background, some Irish or German, some Portuguese.  They’d known each other for maybe thirty years, I think.  One of the Portuguese women shared her experiences when she was a child in New Bedford, and how, on her way to school, the Irish kids down the street threw things at her, told her she wasn’t welcome, no Portuguese were welcome there.  She wasn’t welcome in the school, or in the local Catholic church.

Her friends were astonished.  All about the same age, they had trouble believing her story, but it was for them a beginning, a time to recognize that discrimination is there for many of us, even if those who aren’t being victimized don’t even notice it.

So, we are called to listen, really listen, to those around us, those whose experience of life is so radically different from ours.

But where does the story from John fit in?  Well, look again at it… it tells us that at that time and place, one way to frame Jesus’ death on the cross is to see him as lifted up so that we can look on his love and be healed.  This reading is the complement to the idea of looking back at the bad; now we are encouraged to look forward to the best example of good that has ever lived.

That picture of Jesus, looking down on us with love, will help us discern the right path among all the choices before us.  It will help us recognize the evil in our world, to hear the stories we’ve not noticed before, and to let them change us.

Look on Jesus and be freed from the habits of being self-centered, and the curse off being oblivious to the realities of this world.  Look on Jesus, and be people of everlasting love.

Amen.

© 2024, Virginia H. Child