December 2024 – To Believe is to Care. . . To Care is to Do

Good is Coming, I Can Almost See the Light

December 15, 2024 First Congregational Church of Brimfield UCC

Zephaniah 3:14-20 Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem! The LORD has taken away the judgments against you; he has turned away your enemies. The king of Israel, the LORD, is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more. On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem: “Do not fear, O Zion; do not let your hands grow weak. The LORD, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will renew you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing as on a day of festival.” I will remove disaster from you, so that you will not bear reproach for it. I will deal with all your oppressors at that time. And I will save the lame and gather the outcast, and I will change their shame into praise and renown in all the earth. At that time I will bring you home, at the time when I gather you; for I will make you renowned and praised among all the peoples of the earth, when I restore your fortunes before your eyes, says the LORD.

Luke 1:39-45 In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, ⁴⁰where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. ⁴¹When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit ⁴²and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. ⁴³And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? ⁴⁴For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. ⁴⁵And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

⁴⁶And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, ⁴⁷and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, ⁴⁸for he has looked with favor on the lowly state of his servant. Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed, ⁴⁹for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name; ⁵⁰indeed, his mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. ⁵¹He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. ⁵²He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; ⁵³he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty. ⁵⁴He has come to the aid of his child Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, ⁵⁵according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.” ⁵⁶And Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home.

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.

It all started with a question. At Bible study last Tuesday, we asked ourselves “was Mary the first chosen one the Angel Gabriel approached? Would it make a difference if thirty-one other women had said “no” first?”

What if the first woman had said yes, but she wasn’t really the right person? What if Gabriel came to Mary not because he was sure she was “the one”, but because she was the last one, at the end of the list?

Over the week, I kept coming back to the question – what difference did it make that Mary said “yes”?

You know, as an interim pastor, I see a lot of churches in the process of choosing pastors. Most have a pretty clear idea, by the time the profile is finished, of what they’d like to have. And most have no idea who’s out there looking for a new church. Often, the person they end up calling is not the person they went out looking for, and sometimes it’s because the first two or so candidates said “no”. Like Gabriel, who – we imagine – might have ended up with the Virgin Louise, we might well find ourselves with someone we never thought of at first.

But it’s not just about the process of searching for a new pastor. It’s really about life. We make lists, check them twice, planning as well as we can (knowing that some of us just really don’t plan much at all)…

We go off to college planning to major in history, but by the time we graduate, we have a BS in accounting. It’s not what the plan was; it’s what life is.

Now, as it happens, I believe that Mary was God’s choice from the beginning. Give how self-important some of us feel (and who more than one of God’s chief angels??), I can imagine that Gabriel looked Mary over and thought God had made a mistake.

Why choose a poor girl from a nowhere town, when God could have chosen one of the daughters of the high priest? Someone from the right side of the tracks, someone who knew how to welcome rich folks??

Well, here’s my suggestion. What God wanted in the way of a mother of the Messiah was not someone who was up to date on the latest social trends, but someone who knew pain when she saw it. God didn’t want someone who thought looking good was better than being good.

God wanted the kind of woman who would sing that Magnificat we heard… who would loudly and persistently proclaim that God would pull down the powerful from their thrones.

I read this story yesterday, and as you listen to it, ask yourself what that long-ago Mary said…

Eli McCann told this story about his great-grandfather…… He was around 13 years old, meaning this happened, I guess, right after World War I. Constantly on the verge of homelessness, he was living with his mother and siblings in a run-down hotel room, helping to scrape together enough pennies each week to keep the family somewhat fed and warm. This was a particularly frigid winter in Iowa, per his telling.

Members of his family didn’t really celebrate Christmas because they didn’t have money for gifts. It was easier to try to ignore the day and its annual reminders of their poverty.

That Christmas morning, his mother gave him whatever change she had and asked him to go down to the corner market to buy an item — in repeating the story, he never could remember what the item was. He set off to the store, passing the homes of families keeping warm and exchanging presents.

He arrived at the corner shop, bought the item he was sent to retrieve, and then stepped back onto the icy street wearing whatever rags for clothes he had used to bundle up. As he began to walk away, the store owner came outside and called for him. “He knew our situation,” great-grandpa used to say as tears filled his eyes. “He knew what it was like at home.”

Great-grandpa turned around and paced back to the shopkeeper, who reached out and dropped a handful of nuts into his little palms. “Merry Christmas,” the man said, before turning around and retreating into his store.

Great-grandpa would sometimes say the handful of nuts was the only Christmas gift he ever remembered receiving, and the kindness from the shopkeeper, who apparently had little to spare himself, always stuck with him.

We tend to think about poverty, about homelessness, around this time of year more often than any other time. People struggle outside of the holiday season, of course, but, for some reason, that struggle is more on our collective minds as the snow falls and the wreaths appear on front doors.

Maybe the changing season and the dropping temperatures make it harder to not imagine what it might be like to have nowhere warm to go. Maybe the opulence of the commercial aspects of the holiday celebrations shine a subconscious light on the unfairness of relative privilege and the cruelty in the way it tends to skip a lot of people. Or perhaps the general spirit of giving that permeates December naturally causes us to think about who most needs to receive. I don’t know.

Mary sang:

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly;

he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.

Mary knew God would feed the hungry.

Mary knew God would help the lost.

Mary knew God would be merciful to those who had no way to buy themselves a place at the table.

Maybe Gabriel really did have a list of prospects, and maybe he went to the ones he thought best first. Maybe he skipped Mary at first because she was poor, and a little angry. Maybe Gabriel was messing up big time because he didn’t listen to God.

But God chose Mary because it was time to turn the expectations of a greedy and power-hungry world upside down. And we still remember Mary and her song today because she is such a great example of how we are to live and because we, too, live in a greedy and power-hungry world that desperately needs to be turned upside down.

Our first job, our real calling, is to build a world where love is the only answer. Let us live out Mary’s picture of God’s world.

Amen.

This Isn’t What I Signed Up For

December 8, 2024 First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield MA

Malachi 3:1 -4 See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the LORD whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight—indeed, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like washers’ soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the LORD in righteousness. Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the LORD, as in the days of old and as in former years.

Luke 1:26-38 The Birth of Jesus Foretold ²⁶In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, ²⁷to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. ²⁸And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.”^,* ²⁹But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. ³⁰The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. ³¹And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. ³²He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. ³³He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” ³⁴Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” ³⁵The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. ³⁶And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. ³⁷For nothing will be impossible with God.” ³⁸Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her.

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.

What is our world coming to? Just a few weeks ago, the Archbishop of Canterbury was forced to resign because he’d ignored a damning report [that] concluded that he had failed to pursue a proper investigation into claims of widespread abuse of boys and young men decades ago at Christian summer camps. (NY Times)

Scams abound – emails from (supposedly) your pastor asking you to purchase, say, five $100 Apple gift cards for me to give to people in need….

An insurance company puts a time limit on the amount of anesthesia that can be used for a specific surgery – and when the time runs out, well, I imagine that means the patient starts paying the entire cost – … well, that last one was real,, but right after the head of United Health Care was murdered in NYC, the company changed its mind and will now cover the entire cost of the anesthesia.

<deep sigh> And then there’s the story, from yesterday’s NYT, about the woman in Mississippi who got so frustrated as an elementary teacher that she quit her job and started up a teeny private school for kids in her area, kids who’d found the public school filled with bullies, kids who were slipping through the cracks.

She rented an empty storefront, found desks and equipment in trash piles and discard dumpsters, and she now has 50 children, pre-k to high schoolers, who are studying and learning in this new setting. Tuition is $300 a year, the staff, such as it is, gets paid, but the woman who started the school has not yet taken a salary. Her pay is watching the children learn.

Yes, there’s a lot that’s bad in our world, but we are not here today to focus entirely on that. We are here to remember that in the midst of the worst the world can send us, God is sending us something entirely good.

Today’s Gospel lesson tells the story when it reports Mary saying to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” ³⁵The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.

The story, at least on the surface, is about how Mary became pregnant, and yes, that’s important. More than that, however, it’s the explanation for how it is, in the midst of absolute awfulness, God’s love breaks through. When we are in need, the Holy Spirit will come upon us and change things.

Now this isn’t one of those instantaneous miracles. The Holy Spirit doesn’t force a change upon us; it prepares a way we may choose to follow. That’s the way of love… love offers opportunities, it does not compel.

Sometimes, things are so tough that it’s hard to see beyond the pain, the fear, the costs of life. God’s love, the story of God’s advent in the midst of turmoil, gives us the strength to lift our vision beyond that pain, into the possibilities of our future.

We thought we’d signed up to follow a clear path, one well-marked, where our intention to follow would make the following easy. It turns out that’s not the way it goes.

The way is often difficult, sometimes almost impossible, but what will never change is the steadfast companionship of our loving God, who comes to us as an infant, the living embodiment of God’s love.

Amen.

Why?

I’ve been wondering what could make a devout and practicing Christian, maybe even one of us who doesn’t drink, smoke, sleep around, or do drugs, vote for such a deeply slimy creature as Donald Trump. Why would that person want to forcibly deport every non-Citizen in the US? Why would they hate Black people so much?

How could they possibly believe that elementary schools are doing major surgery in the gym during the lunch period, sending little girls home as little boys, complete with new bodies, new clothes and a deep desire to play second base for the Red Sox?

I’ve come to suspect that we are not really paying attention to what hurting people are saying about their lives. I’d bet that, for many Republican voters, the incoming President’s words are something of a collective finger in the eye to the power structure of our country.

There is a whole half of our country whose lives are failing and in desperation, a forlorn hope, they have voted to the one person they hear saying something is wrong.

President Biden says the economy is great and from one angle it is indeed prospering. But from the point of the individual there is just a narrow sharp edge between survival and despair. As William Barber sharply notes, for many in our country, poverty is one full set of tires away all the time.

I’ve been really poor a couple of times in my life, poor enough that my grocery budget for the week was not more than $20, poor enough that when I needed new brakes for the car, I had to cut out every extra in order to be able to continue to pay the essentials, poor enough that it didn’t always work, and more debt, at close to 30% interest, would accumulate. In fact, I think the difference between being poor and having enough is just that – the ability to absorb an unexpected emergency expense of, say, $1000 or less, without having to adjust the payment of other bills.

For me, that situation was short-term; I knew that, all things being equal, a better day was coming, and it did. But what happens to the folks who cannot see a future? What happens when the Democrats keep insisting the economy is great, when they can’t afford to take the family to McDonalds for dinner?

They stop believing that the Democratic Party, the party of the daily laborer, is still the party that cares about them.

Walter Reuther cared about them. He knew their lives; he’d live it. His dad was an immigrant. Walter himself started working at nine and quit high school for full-time work, and from that unprepossessing beginning, finished high school and then college while working for Ford Motor, eventually becoming an enormously powerful labor leader. Reuther stood for those values and actions we still support today, but without losing touch with the working classes, the working poor, of our country.

Who are our Walter Reuthers today? Who among the Democrats knows how to sit down and listen? Who hears the pain of those who work such poorly paid jobs that a thriving economy never floats their boat?

Here’s my suggestion: let’s step back from trying to convince Republicans that their President is a bad person. Yes, he is, but it doesn’t matter to them, because they have other concerns. So, in our daily conversations, let’s spend more time listening than preaching, let’s learn what their concerns are, why they think (beyond the pizza store delusions) the world is so bad.

And let’s learn what it really takes to live in our communities. What does it cost in your town for a single person or couple to live there? What is rent for a 1 bedroom apartment, if there are any? How much does a minimum acre lot cost? Does your town allow people to live in mobile homes? What does it cost to commute from your community to the closest jobs, and what do they pay?

In Providence, RI, a hotel housekeeper, a person who works 40 hours a week, on their feet, cleaning toilets, making beds, etc etc, makes around $2400 a month gross, and after taxes, is probably going to get about $2000. In my city, the next town over, the cheapest rent I found for a 1 bedroom apartment is $1200 a month.

Budget:

  $1200      rent
300      groceries  @ $75 a week
50      McDonalds once a week, Dunkins 5 times a week
25      clothing, purchased at Savers (new Levis $100 a pair, new sneaks $125)
125      cellphone, internet access
125      cable tv
400      gas, maintenance, car insurance

$ 2225

That budget doesn’t include books, movies, going out with friends. It doesn’t include union dues. It assumes that public transportation is either unavailable, unreliable, or extremely slow. It assumes that having basic cell service, internet access, and cable tv are all essential services. It assumes that the landlord is paying the utilities. It does not include renter’s insurance. And it is unsustainable.

Another thing:

I know this will not be popular, but prioritizing profoundly particular issues over issues of persistent poverty does neither those issues nor people a favor. The way special issues interact with people has changed; rather than leading people along by our advocacies, we are deepening the divisions among us. These days, our advocacy is (a) perceived as an unhealthy fixation on deeply weird practices and (b) an attack on people with other kinds of needs. When, years ago, advocacy for an issue did not mean less for others, today, I suspect that’s how it’s perceived. Today, we who advocate for LGBT issues, for instance, are perceived of doing that instead of advocating for the poor, the desperate. We think it’s both/and; but our advocacy is seen as either/or.

If we advocate more loudly for things other than the economy, poverty, the dearth of opportunity, we’re perceived to be effete eastern liberals: those wacky, self-absorbed people who waste their time working on esoteric issues, living off their grandparents’ trust funds, talking/writing with the biggest words possible, and in general, acting as though their college education has made them better than even those braggarts who talk about having Mayflower ancestors.

In the meantime, the people around us are so desperate for survival, that they’ve cast their hopes on Republicans, a group of people who, save in their yeoman farmer existence, mostly could not care less if the struggling poor survive. (Yeoman farmer Republicans are more like Jeffersonian democrats.) These are people who, in their natural pre-Trump existence, think the poor are a drag on society, who have no right to a job that pays enough to cover the cost of living, much less food, clothing, housing or healthcare. Poor people, they believe, are poor because they don’t know how to manage their money, or because they are stupid, or lazy or on drugs. Republicans believe in eugenics. They think the reason Mexicans pick produce for us is that lazy white people won’t do the work. And when we deport all the illegal immigrants doing this work, those imaginary poor will finally show up and do the work.

Republicans didn’t learn that from Trump. Ronald Reagan believed it; Herbert Hoover believed it. Heck, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr believed it, right after the Civil War, even as he fought in the war.

What does it take for that loving grammy, the one with the never-empty plate of cookies, who loves her part-Dominican grandson, who thinks that David Ortiz is close to a god in her heart – what does it take for her to vote for someone who wants to throw her son-in-law and grand son back to La Romana to never re-enter the US? It takes tons of pain, tons of fear, lots and lots of failure, and a totally destroyed lack of trust.

How can we create relationships which cross the lines which fear embed in our world? What is our task today? Will the same old change our world? Or do we need to re-calibrate our way for this new world? Do we need to stop advocating for LGBT people and issues? No. But we need to also sound the alarm for the poor among us. We need to make our support for the struggling clear and obvious. We need to preach, proclaim, live the whole Gospel of Jesus Christ, now and always.