Month: January 2025

January 26, 2025 First Congregational Church of Brimfield UCC

Nehemiah: 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10 — . . . all the people gathered together into the square before the Water Gate. They told Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses, which the Lord had given to Israel. ² Accordingly, Ezra the priest brought the law before the assembly, both men and women and all who could hear with understanding. This was on the first day of the seventh month. ³ He read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women and those who could understand, and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law. . . .    ⁵ And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was standing above all the people, and when he opened it, all the people stood up. ⁶ Then Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people answered, “Amen, Amen,” lifting up their hands. Then they bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground. . . . . So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.

1 Corinthians 12:12-31 — For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. ¹³ For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. 

¹⁴ Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. ¹⁵ If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. ¹⁶ And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. ¹⁷ If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? ¹⁸ But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. ¹⁹ If all were a single member, where would the body be? ²⁰ As it is, there are many members yet one body. ²¹ The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” ²² On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, ²³ and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect, ²⁴ whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, ²⁵ that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. ²⁶ If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it. 

²⁷ Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. ²⁸ And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, various kinds of tongues. ²⁹ Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work powerful deeds? ³⁰ Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? ³¹ But strive for the greater gifts.

Luke 4:14-21 — ¹⁴ Then Jesus, in the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding region. ¹⁵ He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone. 

¹⁶ When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, ¹⁷ and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: 

¹⁸ “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me  to bring good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives  and recovery of sight to the blind,  to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” ²⁰ And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. ²¹ Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

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.

This has been a hard week for many of us.  One of my colleagues is wondering what the end of federal support of IEPs will mean for her severely autistic son.  What’s happening with that job I agreed to, but that was suspended this week?  Will that high school friend who’s been in the Army all this time have to leave because he’s trans?  You helped prosecute a January 6 seditionist.  Is he going for retribution?  Will gay marriage continue?  What about gay adoptions?  What about immigrants and refugees?  What about the threat to eliminate citizenship for people born in the USA?  Will Indians – Native Americans–  lose their citizenship because they were born on the reservation?  Without going into a lot of details, a lot of people are frightened…. And on and on and on.  For those who are living in fear, this is exhausting.

This morning I don’t want to get lost in arguing each proposal; instead I only want us to remember one thing – whether or not what’s happening is what you wanted or voted for, or if it makes sense to you — or if it terrifies and keeps you up at night – and the one thing to remember is we are all in this together.  If you thought what’s happening would be a good idea, then you have a responsibility to acknowledge the pain and fear of the people for whom it is total disaster.  And if this is disaster to you, then let’s seek to understand why our sisters and brothers thought the situation was so awful that this would improve things.  We are in this together.

There is no separation of people into the good, the better, and the best – or even into the good and the bad – the deserving and the undeserving.  We are all one family.  And the thing that will bring us through, will sustain us, is the strong sustenance we find in the Bible.

We have three readings this morning; separately they may not make much sense; together they give us tools to create a better way to live

The first clue for us is in that reading from Nehemiah.  The way it’s read, you’ll maybe have noticed that we skip some of the verses – that’s not about substance, it’s just that the missing verses give us the names  of the leaders, each and every one of them difficult to pronounce, so we skip them over.  But we don’t skip over the core of the reading – “So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.”  The people sat there and listened because they were desperate to hear some word that would provide meaning to their lives.  And here was the word, and a word that had been explained so they could understand.

Let’s face it.  To think that we need this kind of leadership, these kinds of actions, you have to be pretty desperate.  So, lets listen to Nehemiah as he tells us there is meaning in the words of the Bible, meaning that provides focus, satisfaction, prosperity and love for our lives.

The second clue comes to us from the Gospel, from Luke’s story of that fateful sermon Jesus preached in the synagogue back home in Nazareth.  Here he says, as clearly as possible, that God and faith are all about how we relate to one another, how we build community, how we love, and care, and practice justice and mercy.  Jesus says it this way in the Message translation:

God’s Spirit is on me; he’s chosen me to preach the Message of good news to the poor, Sent me to announce pardon to prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, To set the burdened and battered free, to announce, “This is God’s year to act!”^[1]

Faith in God is about how we live.  And it made people angry… because they’d figured that what made them good was following the rules with no compassion, or making lots of money, or being one of the folks with power in their world.  What Jesus said contradicted everything they’d built their lives on; listening to Jesus brought them face to face with another way of life.

The folks who were angry at Jesus tried to throw him off a local cliff.  They were every bit as happy as the President was last Tuesday when Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde laid before him the Christian call to practice our lives with mercy as well as justice.  No one like to be told they’re wrong, even – or maybe especially when – they have a sneaking suspicion that they are wrong.  Sometimes, however, it’s the job of the preacher to point out that there’s a better way that to throw people out of work, drive them out of the country, destroy their lives, their homes, their families.

There’s one last thing to plug into today’s sermon – the lesson from First Corinthians which tells us that each one of us is a valued part of the whole.  So, that good news from Luke?  It applies to everyone.  Justice is for everyone.  

All the blind, who could not tell right from wrong, all of them were intended by God to see.  

All the oppressed, whether they are undocumented people coming here to work, or motel room cleaners, struggling to get along on $15 an hour… all the people of whatever category, were to live without oppression.  

That’s what God wants for them.  That’s what God wants for us.  And God wants us to notice what’s happening in our world.  God wants us to be aware and that means paying attention to the news, following it well enough to tell truth from fiction.

You could think of the Bible’s teaching as how we’re supposed to live, and then the world around us – newspapers, tv news, media, etc etc – alerts us as to where we can make a difference.  

The Bible tells us we are to help people when disasters strike, when folks are in desperate need; and the news media helps us know where our help is needed.  That’s why the theologian and Swiss pastor, Karl Barth, said, “Take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible.” (Time Magazine, May 1, 1966.)  We remember this as something like “preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.”

What Barth wants us to be sure of is that we pay attention to our world.  Being a Christian is not some quiet thing that we only pay attention to on Sunday morning.  It’s part of our everyday life.  We need to know what’s going on.  In these days, that means reading, watching tv, doing research, keeping your eyes open.

Following the Christian path is part and parcel of the public life of the world.  It is not just about praying at the kitchen table or reading the Bible before bed, but it is about paying attention to what’s going on around us and allowing our faith to direct how we interact with the world.  We come here on Sundays to worship to give praise to God and to support one another, but we go out the door into a world that desperately needs our commitment to welcome, love, justice and mercy.

Remember our calling when you go out and about this week.  Pay attention.  Know that there are people you will meet who are terrified right now… people who need your kindness, your willingness to listen and to care.  The core and heart of our faith is love.  This week, every week, meet everyone with a welcome, with a love that overflows forever.

Amen.

© 2025, Virginia H. Child

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^[1] Eugene H. Peterson, The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2005), Lk 4:18–19.

January 19, 2025  First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield MA

Is 62:1-5; 1 Cor 12:1-11

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 moments, these days, when I feel lost between the choices of yes and no – where both options, or neither, appeals.  And I’m not thinking particularly of what to have for lunch… that’s an easy, even pleasant, problem… shall I have this or that.  I’m thinking more of the big challenges of life.  

In 2026, we in Rhode Island will be electing a governor.  Now, as it happens, I think my current governor’s best characteristics are that he’s tall and has curly hair…. And his worst characteristic is that he doesn’t seem to be concerned that the eastbound 195 bridge through Providence and East Providence, the gateway to Cape Cod, has been closed, re-routed, since December of 2023, and there’s no timetable for re-construction.  

One of the probable candidates running against him is the former head of CVS… well, she sounds good, but CVS was heavily involved in the opioid epidemic, it’s a terrible place to work – or so I hear – the stores are really tatty, and of course, CVS receipts are famous for their length.  But if CVS  is in trouble, what does that say about her potential as governor?  Choices, choices…

Now, Rhode Island’s a small state where every vote, at least statewide, can make a difference.  It’s a place where I can feel as though I have some power. But that’s not always true, we’re in Massachusetts, and way too often, it can feel as though we have no power at all.  We are in an in-between time, a liminal time, where, no matter where we are, we often feel powerless.  Our world feels broken and we don’t think we can make a difference.

It’s a funny place to be on this weekend dedicated to the memory of a man who — starting from a position of absolute powerlessness – unable to vote, barred from public facilities like rest rooms or water fountains, required to use the back door if he was welcome to enter, at constant risk of public humiliation  or physical attack, even death.  If anyone were every powerless in the US it was a Black man in 1950, north or south.  And yet, this man found the lever to change our world.  He found the courage to wield the power of moral indignation.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was not a perfect person.  He wasn’t even a perfect pastor.  But perfection is not one of the requirements to make a difference.  What he was, was a man who dared to exercise the moral power he had, the power of his faith, the power of the church, the power of being in the right.

Yes, Dr. King changed laws but in a deeper way, a more important way for lasting change, he made it impossible for white people to close their eyes to the realities of the world.  Now, that kind of change doesn’t happen overnight.  But it happens, slowly, substantially…. When I was a high school senior in a segregated school system, all my friends knew that segregation was wrong, stupid, immoral.  But what we didn’t know was that it was possible to name it, to make the wrongness public – mostly, I think, what we knew for sure was that it would be dangerous to name our beliefs in public.  Dr. King changed things.  He ripped the curtain down, and yes, like the wizard behind the curtain in Oz, showing for all the world to see how desperately fake the whole structure of racism was.

What he showed us in the 1960s turned out to be only the upper layer of a deeply embedded sickness.  It turns out that you can unsegregate a school without changing the basic mindset of the people in the system.  Unsegregating – which we white people thought was the beginning of the end, turns out to only be the end of the beginning.

Now, these days, we are engaged in the work of digging deeper, of coming to understand the ways in which our unexamined assumptions contain thoughts and actions that are evil.  They used to be jokes, but now they’re not funny any more.  

That’s hard work, and there’s slow progress and it’s times like this weekend, where we have Dr. King before us, and unsettling times to come, when it’s helpful to look again at that foundation on which Dr. King stood.  Because he built his way on the foundation of his faith in God and Jesus Christ.  So will we, if we are to build in a way that brings folks closer to the moral values of our faith.

Dr. King quoted Unitarian pastor Theodore Parker when he said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”  We are not yet where we are going, but we are definitely on the road.

What do our Scripture lessons for today offer us?  Isaiah the prophet wrote in today’s lesson that God will not keep silent, will not rest until the vindication of Zion’s way shines out like the dawn.  It reminds us that we have been at this for a long time.  The path is challenging, sometimes we find ourselves doubling back, re-taking that same path again because we’ve gotten lost, or forgotten the way.   But God is always there, offering us a way, giving us courage, showing us what is to come.  

The lesson from First Corinthians is about not getting lost because we think we’re the only ones.  Remember how I said that back in my high school years, we knew segregation was wrong?  We thought we were alone; it wasn’t until we understood that we weren’t, thanks to the heroism of Dr. King and those who stood with him, that ordinary people were empowered to stand up too.  We are each an important part of the whole, and the whole doesn’t work as well if we are not all on board.

And the gospel lesson, about turning water into wine, reminds us that sometimes we need to make big statements.  Personally, I’m a big fan of small statements, holding doors open, treating everyone I meet with love and generosity, but just as Jesus announced his ministry at a big feast, sometimes there’s a need for that demonstration at the State House, or a march down Main Street.  If we can’t stand up together in public, how will others know we are there?

It looks these days as though the road may be more difficult in the days to come.  That was true in Isaiah’s time, just as it is now.  We are able to stay the course because we are focused on that moral universe.  And we are able to stay the course because we are in this together.

What ties us into union isn’t the uniformity of our political opinions, but rather the uniformity of our moral commitments.  When we’re united in our commitment to kindness, generosity, welcome, mercy, justice, love —  then we can work together on what is best for our church, community, our world.  

It is love which is our power… love lived out every day of our lives, love that quietly keeps going, whether or not it looks like it’s making a difference.  

Amen.

© 2025, Virginia H. Child

January 12, 2025  First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield MA

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 the lectionary, the master calendar of Bible readings we follow, this is the time each year when we remember the beginning of Jesus’ ministry – his baptism at the hands of John the Baptist.  And at the same time, we remember our own baptisms, and think together about what it means that we, too, have been set apart for service to God.

The lessons we’ve just heard are attempt to describe the meaning of baptism.  They’re not literal descriptions, of course… the waters we pass through, the fires which consume are the trials of everyday life – wars or peace, trials of family life, work challenges, election results – whether good or bad, and all those other things that can fill our hearts with pain.

Baptism starts with water; in its most literal understanding, it is as if we are buried in the water and then brought out of that water into a new life…. We have been “saved” for a purpose.

I have to add that it is true that we, like many Christians, have – over the centuries – abbreviated the amount of water considerably.  There have been many reasons for this, and this isn’t the time and place to go over them – it’s better done as a coffee hour conversation, I think – but I want us to be clear, when it comes to the meaning of baptism, or its effects, or how we can understand it in the light of our lives – the amount of water doesn’t matter.  In our baptisms, we have been dedicated to God’s service.

On Thursday, here in this space, we honored the memory of John Hilker.  At almost the same time, down in Washington DC, they were honoring the late President, Jimmy Carter.  President Carter is for us an example of one life dedicated to living out a baptismal call to be a good person.  President Carter may not have been the greatest President the US has ever had, but there has never been a President more dedicated to doing good for as many people as possible, or a President less impressed with himself and his glory. 

A day or two after the service, I had an opportunity to read the eulogy President Carter’s grandson, Jason, shared.  Jason told folks his grandfather, a nuclear engineer by training, struggled to learn how to use a cell phone, that he still lived in a normal-sized house where the phone was connected by wire to the wall… but just listen to what Jason said:

Maybe this is unbelievable to you, but in my 49 years, I never perceived a difference between his public face and his private one. He was the same person, no matter who he was with or where he was. And for me, that’s the definition of integrity.

That honesty was matched by love. It was matched by faith. And in both public and private, my grandparents did fundamentally live their lives in effort, as the Bible says, to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God.

Sometimes I feel and felt like I shared my grandfather with the world. Today is one of those days. But really, he shared the world with me. The power of an atom. The beauty and complexity of a south Georgia forest. When we fished, he celebrated the majesty of everything from the smallest minnow to that grand circulation of waters. And he shared this love with my boys, taking these Atlanta public school kids out into the fields to show them about row crops and wild plums.

In the end, his life is a love story. And of course, it’s a love story about Jimmy and Rosalynn and their 77 years of marriage and service. As the song says, they were the flagship of the fleet. And rest assured that in these last weeks, he told us that he was ready to see her again.

But his life was also a broader love story about love for his fellow humans, and about living out the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. I believe that that love is what taught him and told him to preach the power of human rights, not just for some people, but for all people. It focused him on the power and the promise of democracy, its love for freedom, its requirement and founding belief in the wisdom of regular people raising their voices and the requirement that you respect all of those voices, not just some.

That’s the way of the baptized, to be love wherever we are.  And you don’t have to step aside for the famous or powerful, like Jimmy Carter.  There’s a place for each of us in God’s vision of the world; so here’s a story of a woman I knew and admired greatly: 

When I first moved to Rutland, Vermont, I wasn’t any kind of church person. My husband and I were looking for a new place to set down roots after his retirement from the Marine Corps and Rutland was the place for us.  And then life interfered.  My marriage broke up and one Sunday I found myself sitting in a church, Grace Congregational UCC.  As I looked around I recognized a number of the people I saw there – particularly the kind, sensible ophthalmologist I’d been to when I failed the DMV’s vision test… and that woman from the First National Grocery Store, the one whose line was always the longest in the store.

Dot wasn’t a slow checker, not by any means.  In fact, the reason her line was always so long is that people wanted to go through that line – because when you brought your groceries to her, she took you seriously.  When she said hi and asked how your day had gone, she really wanted to know.  It wasn’t empty words.  After I got to know her she told me that she’d early figured out that for many of the people who came to that store, she was the only human being they knew, the only person they talked to in the week.  It was Dot who taught me about the hidden poor of Vermont, the men and women who lived alone, who survived on cat food tuna.  Dot paid attention to the people who came through her line; she lived out her baptismal call.

On this day, when we remember that we are baptized followers of the way of love, the challenge laid out before us is clear.  How can we live out our lives so that we are, like Jimmy Carter and Dot Potter, people who radiate God’s love to all?  What will we do, today, this week, this year, so that our world knows that it is the power of love that will  create a better world?

Amen.

© 2025, Virginia H. Child

January 5, 2025, First Congregational Church of Brimfield MA UCC

Jeremiah 31: 7-14 — For thus says the LORD: Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob, and raise shouts for the chief of the nations; proclaim, give praise, and say, “Save, O LORD, your people, the remnant of Israel.”

See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth, among them the blind and the lame, those with child and those in labor together; a great company, they shall return here.

With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back; I will let them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path where they shall not stumble, for I have become a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn.

Hear the word of the LORD, O nations, and declare it in the coastlands far away; say, “He who scattered Israel will gather him and will keep him as a shepherd does a flock.”

For the LORD has ransomed Jacob and has redeemed him from hands too strong for him.

They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion, and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the LORD, over the grain, the wine, and the oil, and over the young of the flock and the herd; their life shall become like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again.

John 1: 10-18 — He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

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 prophet Jeremiah wrote to his fellow Jews in the years around 570BCE, just about 2600 years ago, in a time when his land was constantly being overrun by enemies.  He wrote in a time when there was constant dissention and a continual stream of less-than-competent, honest or courageous leaders for the kingdom of Judah.  And, of course, this got him in trouble = he was arrested, people tried to kill him, and he likely ended his life in exile in Egypt.

Jeremiah wasn’t just a political columnist, though.  He saw his people in a religious crisis, being in a place where it was maybe better to step away from active faith, who were maybe going to conform to the religion of the winners just to get ahead… like the people I read about in Saturday’s NY Times, who were converting to Catholicism from Islam, to better express their Albanian identity.  It’s not about faith, it’s about political fighting.  Jeremiah wanted something better, something more faithful, more God-focused for the people of Judah.

And so do we want something better for people here and now as well.

That’s why his description of God’s intention for us is so important.  He doesn’t say, this political party or that party will win.  He doesn’t say get rich because that’s what God wants.  He says God welcomes the people who cannot see, the ones who have difficulty in walking.  God welcomes those who are expecting children == in his world, the least productive people are the most welcome.  God welcomes those who are most left behind.  God reaches out to those who are scattered, and brings them back together into community.  That’s the goal of faith – to have us all living in community, welcoming one another, recognizing the importance of every individual.

But it’s one thing to say we welcome everyone, in spite of whatever makes them different than what we think is usual or normal or every day.  That’s because really welcoming people means really recognizing them as good, as people whose differences are something our community needs to be fulfilled.

Now, I’m not talking about being excited about the local member of the Governor’s Council joining the church because now we will have governmental influence.  I’m talking about becoming, growing into a true reflection of God’s intention for us.  

Here’s what I mean:  I am not completely naïve; I expect that even before the UCC became Open and Affirming at the national level around 1985, there were LGBT+ members.  In fact, I know there were, and I know they were rare enough that we remember the names of the few who found it possible to be open….  Bill Johnson, and Anne Holmes, and up in New Hampshire, Bob Wood. They were there, but they were quiet, not silent, but not entirely welcome… Then in 1985, the Synod voted to be ONA.  The next Synod was different… LGBT+ people were there, and clearly felt as though now they belonged, that this was _their_ place, that they were no longer guests, there on sufferance.  And the Synod itself was different, more vibrant, more colorful, more relaxed, more just what God is calling us to be.  

Every time the Synod has acted to explicitly welcome another group, the whole Synod has changed in exciting new ways.  I remember when they started formally arranging for 12 step meetings every day, instead of expecting our AA people to create something after they arrived.   It didn’t change the outward appearance of the group, but it removed the tint of shame from a condition so many of us try to manage.  And when one color of shame is taken away, it frees us to re-examine other ways of making people feel unwelcome and then welcome.

God is calling us to be a community where people can bring their whole selves, where they don’t have to hide who they are, where those of us who are already here let go of that “but this is my church” kind of feeling, because it’s not, you know.  It’s God’s church.

It’s not that we don’t already do that; the chair lift is one sign of our welcome, our ONA stand is another, for sure…. Here, tho, I want us to be clear that we are doing this because it’s what God has called us to do and to be.  Where is God calling us today?  Is our welcome true?  What is our work today?

From time to time we get to spend some time talking together about who we are right now, and about who might not feel welcome here.  That’s one of the conversations we always have during the interim period, and we’re going to be starting that process next Sunday after church, eating together and exploring who we are and how we’re following God.  Put it on your calendar, make it an important date, and help us begin discerning where God is calling us.

Amen.

© 2025, Virginia H. Child