Month: April 2024

April 28, 2024 First Congregational Church UCC in Auburn, MA

Acts 8:26-40

²⁶ Then an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Get up and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” (This is a wilderness road.) ²⁷ So he got up and went. Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, the queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship ²⁸ and was returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah. ²⁹ Then the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over to this chariot and join it.” ³⁰ So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” ³¹ He replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him. ³² Now the passage of the scripture that he was reading was this: 

“Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. ³³ In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth.” 

³⁴ The eunuch asked Philip, “About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” ³⁵ Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus. ³⁶ As they were going along the road, they came to some water, and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?”^,*38 He commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water, and Philip baptized him. ³⁹ When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; the eunuch saw him no more and went on his way rejoicing. ⁴⁰ But Philip found himself at Azotus, and as he was passing through the region he proclaimed the good news to all the towns until he came to Caesarea.

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.

Some years ago, I accompanied a colleague and her youth group when they attended the UCC’s General Synod, our national meeting that happened in those days every other year.  My friend was serving the South Dakota Conference and she’d brought ten kids from the high plains to our meeting in Norfolk, Virginia.

None of the kids had ever been east of the Mississippi River before.   All went well, and the kids were really invested in the meetings, spending evenings talking over the issues that were being discussed that year.  Until the day we took them to Virginia Beach.

Until that day, the ocean had been some mystical invention, and they’d not been able to imagine what it would be like to see that much water at once.  Nor had they anyway to imagine how different swimming in salt water would be, how different the scents, how amazing the sandy beach.  Yes, they have beaches in South Dakota, but they are all for fresh-water ponds and lakes.  Beautiful, but very different – much more closed in than the Atlantic Ocean.  And it didn’t hurt that the Virginia Beach boardwalk is lined with great places to eat and have fun.

From that day on, all the kids wanted to do was go to the beach.   Their focus had been completely changed.  When the meeting ended, they got back on their plane, sandy and sunburned, and with a new perspective on the world.

Today’s scripture reading is something of an odd story…. The evangelist Philip talks with a magic angel, and keeps getting taken off to new places… the other guy in the story doesn’t even have a name.  He’s just the “Ethiopian eunuch”.  But maybe that’s really what matters – what he was, instead of who he was.

So, Philip finds himself on the road to Gaza, yes, the Gaza where the fighting is right now.  And he meets this man we only know by his nationality and his physical state.  But they, especially the latter, were more than enough to put him outside the lines of acceptability in polite society, in religious society.  The rule was, you had to have all your body parts to be acceptable.  All of them.  If you didn’t have pair of hands, or something more important, you weren’t able to offer sacrifices in the temple.  And there was always a good deal of malicious gossip about eunuchs, just to make things worse.

The Ethiopian is an unacceptable man.  But the story makes it clear that he’s also a man of faith.  The traditions and practices that have come together over the years have limited him to an in-between space where he’s not out, but he’s also not really in.

Philip changes all that.  He explains the gospel of Jesus to the Ethiopian, whose immediate reaction is to ask for baptism.  History tells us that this man continued to share the story of Jesus, and while Christianity wasn’t really established in Ethiopia for another two hundred years, this is part of the beginning of that story.

When Philip told the Ethiopian that God accepted him, as he was, it changed the direction of that man’s life.  It changed his purpose and over the centuries, it changed his homeland.

Change is our theme for the day.   The Search Committee is circulating our profile, and we can anticipate a new pastor. Part of my job as an interim is to give you a taste of change, so that you’ll be ready for someone who will bring with them different perspectives.  

Change can be scary.  It can be unsettling.  It can cause us to mourn beloved traditions that are now sharing time and space with other ideas, other perspectives.  Opening up to new ideas can be life-changing, invigorating.  And it can be hard.

What happens when you see things from a new way?  Instead of automatically turning away, assuming that the outsider/imperfect could not benefit, Philip turned towards, and assumed there could be good.  How does such an idea affect us?  

Some change is going to happen naturally because it in things like new decorations in the pastor’s office, or a different selection of hymns.  We pastors do our best to keep singing the favorites, but sometimes it takes a while to identify them – and you’ve a great hymnal with a lot of good songs in it.  But out of those changes, you’ll learn new favorites.

Some change will be more intentional.  If  you want different results from on-going programs, or if you want to try a new project, then there will have to be changes.  Some changes, like the shelves Nathan Minor is building for his Eagle project, will be immediately useful.  Some things will take time.  And some of them will be failures.  

When those opportunities come along, I hope you’ll remember Philip and how, when faced with something he’d been taught all his life couldn’t happen, gathered the courage to turn in a different direction, welcoming in, taking advantage of the opportunity to think about what we do, why we do it this way, and where we want to be heading.

You get to practice now with me, so that you’ll be ready for what your new pastor will bring with vigor and enthusiasm and ideas for tomorrow.

Let’s all be Philips in the days and months to come.

Amen.

© 2024, Virginia H. Child

Acts 4:5-12

⁵ The next day the rulers, the elders and the teachers of the law met in Jerusalem. ⁶ Annas the high priest was there, and so were Caiaphas, John, Alexander and others of the high priest’s family. ⁷ They had Peter and John brought before them and began to question them: “By what power or what name did you do this?” 

⁸ Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them: “Rulers and elders of the people! ⁹ If we are being called to account today for an act of kindness shown to a man who was lame and are being asked how he was healed, ¹⁰ then know this, you and all the people of Israel: It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed. ¹¹ Jesus is “ ‘the stone you builders rejected, which has become the cornerstone.’ ^{k 12} Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.” 

I John 3:18

¹⁸ Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.

John 10:11-13

¹¹ “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. ¹² The hired hand is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep. So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away. Then the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it. ¹³ The man runs away because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.

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.

Nobody’s perfect.

Last week I talked about the terrible hatreds which mar our world, especially those hatreds which have led to the persecution and death of Jews.  I talked about how that kind of hatred exists, at smaller levels, and that even at those levels it is dangerous.  And finally I said that we are called by God to stand against the hate in our world.

I don’t know about you, but I think that’s an overwhelming task.  And so, today, I want to talk with you about hope, and struggle and what success looks like for us – not just when we’re dealing with hate, but in all our lives.

So, let’s be to it.

Last week, when we heard the story from Acts, we saw the beginning of a conversation between Peter and local leaders.  This time, when I read it, what struck me was that everyone in the conversation was a failure.  No matter what they were trying to do, they had not completely succeeded.  

Remember, Peter himself, the leader of the newly emerging Christian community, is the man who denied Jesus not once but three times on the night of Jesus’ arrest.  He’s definitely not perfect.

The leaders of the local community have nothing but difficult conversations and dangerous decisions – and they are not always making the right choices.

And yet, good has still happened.  Even when people didn’t do their best, even when they didn’t have a best to do, good happened.  

I want to be clear.  I don’t mean that good will always come, especially from the actions of the despicable, the mean, the greedy.  I’m not trying to set up an excuse for the criminals among us.  

People do, you know, do try to set up excuses.  I was reading a post on Facebook about famous people buried in East Providence recently…. It turned out that Raymond Patriarca, the late head of the Patriarca crime family is buried in East Providence – to my amazement, a number of people commented on how much they appreciated, respected, even loved this man, who controlled all gambling, prostitution, and other illegal activities in our area.  Those who wrote about him said he’d helped their grandmothers, that he was kind to little kids, that he supported the Church… and in their minds that made the murders, the thefts, the beatings and all, just fine.

That’s not where I’m heading.  I’m talking about how we who try to follow the Christian way can deal with the reality that we are no perfect.  It can sound like God wants us to be perfect, but in fact God accepts us as we are.  We are invited to do our best, not expected to never fail

In First John, we’re reminded that what God calls us to do, is not so much about what we say, but what we do, and how we do it.  That’s the foundation of moving ahead after we’ve messed things up, after we’ve made mistakes.  That’s our hope.  Because life is both good and bad, marked by both successes and failure.  Our hope is that, even when we fall down, the way we tried will still make a difference.

In the Gospel lesson, Jesus describes the difference between good shepherds and hired hands.  We try to follow Jesus, so we model ourselves on that Good Shepherd; the thing is, much of the time, we’re more like that hired hand. 

Now, given a choice between being the shepherd and the hired hand, we’re all supposed to want to be the leader.  And often our world pictures hired hands as if they are lazy, or uninterested; we’re supposed to want to keep moving on up, getting better and better at whatever.  If we meet 

Often hired hands are though of like the young man who mows my yard.  Surely this is not something he does for a passion for yard work?  Surely if he has ambition this is just something he does until something better comes along?  Hired hands just do it for money, right?  Or, they’re folks without ambition?  

Maybe really not capable of much more?  Yes, there’s a kind of hired hand who is in it just for the money, and sure there are hired hands who don’t care whether they do a good job or not.  But that doesn’t mean there aren’t hired hands who work right up to the limits of their abilities, who do their best to do whatever’s required.  Maybe we’re not owners, but we care.  

This is really important today, for we live in a world which often seems intolerant of the least shortcoming.  

I imagine myself as the ever-perfect Good Shepherd, and almost bow under the need to be good, all the time.  It is as if God is demanding perfection of me, and perfection is beyond my capacity.  But when I picture myself as that lowly hired hand, struggling to do my best, falling down from time to time, making mistakes, yet encouraged by God to get up and try again, it fills me with hope.  And I hope it does that for you as well.

God has given us a great opportunity to join in the work of making our world better.  And God knows how hard that is, how it involves hard work on our own bad habits, hard work in our world… God knows how we will, from time to time, fall short of our own expectations.  And yet, God keeps us on staff.  We will not be fired.  We will not be made redundant.  There is no downsizing here.  

Every one of us matters.  We matter when we’re at our best.  We matter when we’re not.  We matter when our spirit flags, when we just want to give up.  There is no time when we do not matter to God.  That is our hope.

In Robert Frost’s famous poem, The Death of the Hired Man, an old hired hand come back to the farm, looking for work, looking for shelter.  And the husband’s not so sure that taking him back is a good idea….. he’s not been reliable, left the last time over not getting a raise.  The farmer just doesn’t want to depend on him any more.

And undependable hired hand…. And yet, he has come to them as if this were his home.  The farmer says:

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.  His wife responds, “I should have called it something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

That is our hope, that God has made for us a home and it is a place we don’t need to deserve.  It is a free offer, made out of love.  God hopes we will do good in our lives, but God’s love doesn’t depend on that good.  It comes before any good we do, and it is our hope.

Amen.

© 2024, Virginia H. Child