Month: November 2024

November 17, 2024     First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield MA

Galatians 3:28-29 —  There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.

1 John 3:1-3 — See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called childrren of God, and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer.  Amen.

When I was just a toddler, my mother began to read me stories from Mary Alice Jones’ book Tell Me About God.  In some ways, I think, it was an odd book…. Tho hugely popular among mainstream Protestant parents, it focused on God.  Most kids’ faith-oriented books these days are about Jesus, or about ways to live… God barely gets a mention, much less whole stories…

And yet, God, and how we understand God, is the foundation of how we construct our lives together in community, how we create and maintain families, how we interact with others.  It feels as though God is not only unseen, but also unmentioned. So, today, I want to tell some stories about God, that we might meditate together on how that God forms our world.

God is Good.

God is good.  This is the foundation of the whole story.  Our entire understanding of our world, we believe, is built on the idea that God is good.

Not all gods are good, you know.  We believe there is only one god, but many other belief systems teach there are multiple gods, and just about always, one of those god is not good.  Maybe a trickster god, and even sometimes a god that is purely evil.

But Christians believe that God is good.

We struggle with it, especially when we’ve had tough stuff in our lives.  I worked once with a church which had almost split over the interim’s (not mine) use of the call and response God is good all the time/all the time God is good.  Every single person who hated the phrase (and also the interim) had lost a child.  They were all mad as blazes with God.  In some cases the death had been maybe 30 years previously, but their pain and betrayal almost broke the church.

So, let’s look a little more at what it means that God is good.  

• It means that, no matter how bad things are, we are never left alone.
• It means that, no matter how small our resources, we always have opportunities to share love

When I was three, my sister was born and died.  I was mad at God.  I mean, really, who else can you be mad at when you’re three?  Not my mother, not my father; they were as devastated as I was.  And at 3, the health care system wasn’t much more than vague “hospital” mentions.  It was no where on my horizon that my sister could have died because of their incompetence.  And, I have to add, her death wasn’t the hospital’s fault; she was born on the edge of survivability.  But I thought a good God’s job was to protect us from all harm.  

That’s when I was three and struggling to make sense of a world where my sister had died, my parents grieved, and I was increasingly chronically ill.

Over the years, however, I began to notice that in the  Bible, when things went bad, God still was there.  I realized that “things going bad” is part and parcel of the reality of life.  We are not kept super safe, wrapped in cotton and protected from all harm.  

Last week, when I was sick, I ordered groceries delivered.  That head of iceberg lettuce I looked for arrived as a head of cauliflower.  That was not God sleeping on the job, but what someone at the store was a reasonable substitution.  They were wrong, but they tried.

God is with us.  When we are broken by our lives and have no one else to rage with, God is there.  

The Bible agrees.

Today’s readings are all about love.  “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God”, and the lesson from Galatians which makes it clear that God has called us into one human family.  There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

All throughout the journeys of Paul, he testifies to the power of the presence of God in his life. Even when he’s under arrest, transported to Rome, and then facing execution, God is with him.

God is good; God is love. 

In the past few days, we’ve begun to come to grips with the truth that, no matter which way you slice our electorate, an awful lot of us are in a terrible state of fear and anticipation.  It would have been that way no matter who won, you know.  I think the overarching emotion of this election was terror, and for many of us the choices boiled down to something like, who’s the least frightening.  I’m not going to march us through a list of what scares each of us the most, tho I will suggest that if you can’t figure out what the other side is worried about, that might make a good personal research project.

What I am going to say is that this is a good time to remember that God is good, God is reliable, strengthening.  God is love. 

There were a lot of good little stories in that book I read, but this was the most important one.  If you remember nothing else about God, remember that God is love.  Remember that we are never abandoned, never condemned, but always loved, always “at home” when we are with God.

Amen.

© 2024, Virginia H. Child

November 3, 2024    First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield MA

Wisdom 3:1-9 — the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them.   In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died, and their departure was thought to be a disaster and their going from us to be their destruction,  but they are at peace. For though in the sight of others they were punished,  their hope is full of immortality. Having been disciplined a little, they will receive great good, because God tested them and found them worthy of himself; 

John 11:32-35– When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep.

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.

For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, “It might have been.” – John Greenleaf Whittier

It might have been… Whittier’s poem was about two young people who thought they might be a couple, but who never took the first step… and so spent their lives dreaming of what might have been…instead of reaching out

I know you’ve heard the line – if I hadn’t done this, then that would have happened – or if I had done that, then the other wouldn’t have happened….   Sometimes that’s true, of course.  If I didn’t eat that ice cream. . .  or, if I hadn’t gone 80 mph on the Pike, I might not have gotten that expensive ticket.  That’s one aspect, but there’s another, nastier way I hear that being used – used as a way to blame.

My closest cousin was born with Prader-Willi syndrome, a chromosomal malformation that meant she had numerous physical and cognitive issues.  I don’t know how often people came to my aunt and uncle suggesting that if they’d only done this, or not done that, Char would have been “normal”.  I don’t know how often people tried to blame them for the random action of dividing cells.  I do know that it was a long time before they stopped blaming themselves.

Maybe you’ve heard that another way:  if I’d disciplined my child better, they wouldn’t have …. Or if I hadn’t asked so much, or hadn’t worked so late, or whatever.  And it’s always a kind of blame that makes us wish… it might have been different.

That’s so hard, especially when someone dies.  We remember that this weekend when it’s All Saints Sunday.  Oh how I wish I could have another conversation with my father; why didn’t I do more?

Could I have been more loving, kinder, less critical…  Could I have said one more word?  Is there something I could have done to change the outcome?  Could I have made it different?

One of my favorite poem is Otherwise, by Jane Kenyon

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

When things don’t go the way we want, it’s all too easy to fall into “it might have been”.  It’s so tempting to think that if we had done just one more thing, or done something just a little differently, it would all have turned out differently.

Our lives are our lives.  We live them the best we can in the moment.  Sometimes that’s not so good, sometime it’s darned close to perfect.  We might wish they had gone better, or that we’d had one more good day together.  We often miss those who are gone and wish we could go back.  That’s real, that’s our love speaking, our sorrow.  

Just the other day, I was driving from Manchester CT back to Providence along Route 44 and thought – just for a moment – how much I would have enjoyed having my father in the car with me.  Woodstock CT was his homeland; he knew all the stories, all the people.  But he died before we would ever have had an opportunity for that ride, and just for a moment, I wondered what might have been.

You’ve been in that place as well.  It’s a good place, but it’s not a place to live.  Maybe God gives us “it might have been” to enjoy the possibility, or to imagine the continuation of a beloved relationship, but living there is no substitute for where we are now.

This is particularly important to hold in our hearts this week, as we face a general election for President of the United States.  No matter which way things go, we cannot maroon ourselves in “it might have been”.    Even if your candidate wins, even if every candidate you support gets elected, we all still need to move beyond “it might have been” … it might have been less contentious.  It might have been less angry.  Less filled with lies.  

Let me be clear.  I am not just talking from my side of the vote.  Almost everyone I know thinks the other side, whoever that may be, is lying, is angrier, hate-filled, misrepresenting reality.

Today’s lessons point us toward a different view of truth.  We only see partially, they tell us.  We see what matters to us in our particular setting.  Sirach wrote that “the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God and no torment will ever touch them”.  We see what is not, God sees all.  We see what we don’t have; God can see the whole picture.

We are worried about this election; whatever the result, we will still be followers of God.  We still will be able to tell right from wrong.  

If our candidate wins, we will still have the tough job of building community in our world.  If the other candidate wins, the job will still be the same.  

Most likely each of thinks our work will be easier, our lives better, if our candidate wins.  Here’s something to think about though:  no matter who wins, building trust, accepting difference, living out Christ’s call to love, whoever folks are, wherever they are on life’s journey, is still going to be a challenge.

Soon we will share the meal of Holy Communion with one another.  Let that time be a time for us to re-dedicate ourselves to the work of sharing Christian love with our community. Step from “it might have been” into this is what it is, and we can do this hard thing.  Let us be people of love, now and always.

Amen.

© 2024, Virginia H. Child