Month: February 2025

February 23, 2025 First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield MA

Genesis 45:3-11, 15: ³ Joseph said to his brothers, “I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?” But his brothers could not answer him, so dismayed were they at his presence. 

⁴ Then Joseph said to his brothers, “Come closer to me.” And they came closer. He said, “I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. ⁵ And now do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life. ⁶ For the famine has been in the land these two years, and there are five more years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvest. ⁷ God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to keep alive for you many survivors. ⁸ So it was not you who sent me here but God; he has made me a father to Pharaoh and lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt. ⁹ Hurry and go up to my father and say to him, ‘Thus says your son Joseph, God has made me lord of all Egypt; come down to me; do not delay. ¹⁰ You shall settle in the land of Goshen, and you shall be near me, you and your children and your children’s children, as well as your flocks, your herds, and all that you have. ¹¹ I will provide for you there, since there are five more years of famine to come, so that you and your household and all that you have will not come to poverty.’. . . ¹⁵ And he kissed all his brothers and wept upon them, and after that his brothers talked with him.

Luke 6:17-26 ²⁷ “But I say to you who are listening: Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; ²⁸ bless those who curse you; pray for those who mistreat you. ²⁹ If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. ³⁰ Give to everyone who asks of you, and if anyone takes away what is yours, do not ask for it back again. ³¹ Do to others as you would have them do to you.

³² “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. ³³ If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. ³⁴ If you lend to those from whom you expect to receive payment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. ³⁵ Instead, love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. ³⁶ Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. 

³⁷ “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; ³⁸ give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap, for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.” 

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.

If anyone had reason to be angry, to hold a grudge, it was Joseph.  Now, it’s true that Joseph was an obnoxious kid, always boasting, always getting the best of everything, but still, you remember, his brothers – together, all of them agreeing – sold him into slavery and told his father than he’d been killed.

That’s taking anger too far.  Really, too far.

But his life has changed Joseph; he’s now a man, not an immature twit.  He’s wise, well-respected, and now – because of what happened – he’s in a place to help all his family.  He has the power, and the intent, to bring them all to Egypt, and to give them food and homes, to bring their families back together.

Sure, a lot of bad stuff had happened, and not just to Joseph.  His father, Jacob, had dealt with years of sorrow.  The brothers had lived with the guilt of their actions.  But when the day of reunion came, all that was left behind.  Everyone was welcomed.

This lesson is paired with one from Luke, a lesson that – much more plainly – tells us to leave our grudges behind.  “Do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you; pray for those who mistreat you….”

Now, I’m all for not holding grudges, but I want to point out that Joseph and his family appear to have had twenty years or more to get over things, and they’re all in better places.  Letting go of a grudge a billion years after the bad thing has happened is much easier, than when you’re right in the midst of that bad thing.

So, let’s think together a little about evil, about how it marks us, about how – when we’re in the midst of bad things – how we’re supposed to behave.

On Friday, I happened to read the obituary of a RAF pilot who was shot down and captured by the Germans in World War II.  In the course of his captivity, he was betrayed by a double agent, tortured, condemned to death in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, starved by the guards there, and saved in the nick of time –  2 days before his scheduled execution – when the German Air Force discovered he was there, and demanded that he be turned over to them because only the German Air Force could hold Royal Air Force captives.  

It was only four months, but for the rest of his life he suffered from the after-effects, both physical and psychological.  After the war, it was his life’s passion to obtain recognition of the airmen who’d been sent to concentration camps and the secret agents who’d been killed in the course of their duties.

The pain never ended.  Healing never really came.  That’s not uncommon.  You don’t need to spend time in a concentration camp. Years ago, I knew a man who – 40 years after the end of World War II – still had such violent nightmares, every night, that he and his wife had to sleep in separate rooms.  He was in combat in Europe for less than a year, but it never went way.

How do you let go of the hatred, the anger, when it’s so deeply imprinted?

Last week, one of my gay friends was telling us about some nasty emails he’d been receiving… they said things like “you can’t be a Christian”, “you’re not a real pastor”, “you and your husband are an abomination”.  I was thinking about what it’s like to get those emails every day.  I know they’re upsetting – I get them, too, because people don’t think women can be pastor, but I only get them once or twice a year.  He get them every week, maybe even every day.  

What are you supposed to do when someone suggests that a plane crash happened only because the pilot was Black?  Or people claim that the only reason Black people have jobs is that they somehow pushed a better qualified White person aside?

How do you handle the fear and the rage when the government says you’re not a real person.  You’re trans, but no, trans doesn’t really exist, so you must be troubled.  It’s not enough for you and me to say “baloney”. How do we handle the hatred, the anger, that lies behind those lies, without destroying our own souls?

Prejudice, the baked in assumptions about people other than ourselves, are part of our world.  It can eat us up, poison our lives.  Another story – from one advice columnist – a woman writes in to say that she’s Hindu, from India, married to a White American.  Before the wedding, he was all in on enjoying her Hindu culture as much as his own.  He didn’t mind the Hindu wedding, enjoyed Hindu food, and so on.  But now that they’re married, he’s demanding that their (so far non-existent) children be raised as Christians, that they eat beef, and that she should step away from the culture of her parents. In other words, he’s backed off on the commitment to respect her background.

Prejudice is driving his actions, just as prejudice is driving the actions of hatred in our world today. 

There are moments in today’s world where it seems as though we are being led by grudge rather than vision, where the slightest difference can lead to revenge wreaked on thousands of, oh FAA workers, or rural organic farmers, or you, or me.  There is no clearer way to see how grudges, how the desire to get our own back, to heap vengeance on the other, destroys a person, destroys a society, than watching the last couple of days on the news.  

Congressional representatives are worried that if they don’t vote the right way, vengeance will mean a primary opponent and they’ll lose their position.  Governors are told that if they don’t go along with the government lie that trans people don’t exist, they’ll lose all the Federal money that has been committed to them.

Our faith in Jesus Christ is intended to help us cope with that kind of hatred without pickling our souls in reciprocal anger.  But it’s not as easy as Joseph and his brothers make it seem.  Things are going to happen that will make us angry, for sure.  Just remember that there’s a difference between being angry, and becoming a perpetually angry person.  Remember that we cannot return their hatred with our own hatred.  We cannot let evil take up residence in our hearts.

Peter Marty, Lutheran pastor and editor of The Christian Century, wrote this week:   My interest in this vengeance trend has little to do with any of us effectively dissuading others from finding pleasure in revenge. It’s rather a reminder that we best counter such behavior by anchoring our own lives more deeply in God.

Shalom Nagar was the prison guard chosen by lottery, against his will, to pull the lever that killed Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann on the gallows. For decades, Nagar lived out the trauma and guilt of that event in secrecy. When his identity was eventually revealed, a German television crew wanted to interview him about his sense of vengeance. He asked them to come to his study, where he devoted his days to the Torah. “I want the German people to know,” he said, “that not only did Jewish people survive physically . . . but also that we are still learning Torah. I want them to see Jews alive and studying Torah . . . for the Torah lives, too.”

To turn more attentively to the kind of life scripture proposes for us is the best antidote I know to America’s growing addiction to revenge. [The Christian Century, March 2025]

Our call as Christians is to build community, and we cannot do that with soul-eating anger as our motivation.  We are a people of love.  Name what’s wrong and work for what is right.  Pay attention to the words in the Bible, to the heart of our faith. 

Amen.

© 2025, Virginia H. Child

February 16, 2025 First Congregational UCC, Brimfield MA  

Luke 6:17-26

¹⁷ He came down with them and stood on a level place with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. ¹⁸ They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases, and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. ¹⁹ And everyone in the crowd was trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.²⁰ Then he looked up at his disciples and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.  ²¹ “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. ²² “Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. ²³ Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven, for that is how their ancestors treated the prophets ²⁴ “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.  ²⁵ “Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. “Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. ²⁶ “Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets. 

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.

OK, here’s my question for you for today.  Are we basically individuals, each our own person, separate from one another?  Or are we basically a community, not just better together, but maybe not made to live completely separate lives?

And why does it matter?

Here’s the thing:  in order to live in the way that makes the most sense to us, we need to understand what’s really important.  

When I was little, my mother made all my clothes.   She enjoyed it, did it well,  made really nice things that I was proud to wear.  And she was clear, she did it primarily not because it was a hobby, but because doing it saved money.  She sewed with her best friend who had a daughter my age.  Often they used the same patterns, but her friend used much better fabric.  She wasn’t sewing to keep within a budget; she was sewing much better clothes than my mother was making.  Neither one was better than the other, it’s just that they had different goals – one wanted to stay within a budget, the other wanted to make better clothes than she could afford to buy.  It’s important to know why we’re making the choices we are.

In order to live in the way God is calling us to, we need to know what’s really important.  Today’s lesson points us towards what God thinks is important.  And what God thinks is important is that we live in community.

God thinks, Jesus says,  that community is what matters.  

The Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf, who teaches at the Yale Divinity School, has written: The singleness of this vision implies more than that everyone ought to live it out. All humans and all life on the planet are interdependent, an interconnected ecology of relatedness. The image of home expresses this vision, perhaps, better than any other in the Bible. For one person to truly flourish, the entire world must flourish; for the entire world to truly flourish, every person in it must flourish; and for every person and the entire world to truly flourish, each in their own way and all together must live in the presence of the life-giving God.

There’s a world out there where people think that what matters is “me first, my family second, my friends third, and maybe that person in need down on the corner, maybe I’ll help them later.”  Those folks are even willing to try to pervert Christian theology to make it sound as tho God wants us to be “me first”, selfish, dismissive of anyone who gets in their way.  That way will build a world of fractured relationships, hostilities, hatred and – eventually – war.

So, listen again to the words Jesus spoke:

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. 

²¹ “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. 

“Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. 

²² “Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. 

²³ Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven, for that is how their ancestors treated the prophets. 

²⁴ “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. 

²⁵ “Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. 

“Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. 

²⁶ “Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets. 

Who matters?  The poor matter.  The hungry matter.  Those who weep for our world matter.  God rejoice when we stand up for the right.

But if you chose to do what was right and easy for  you, well, you got your reward.  That’s it.

And let’s make it clearer.  The people who decided to wipe trans folks out of the history of the Stonewall National Monument Site, well, they’re wrong.  People are people, just like love is love.  You can’t pretend they don’t exist just by wiping them from the web site.

Any claim that some people matter more than others, or that some can simply be wiped out of existence, is a claim that will destroy community, turn us one against the other, and do exactly the opposite of what is described in this lesson.

We are being called to be people of love and grace.  We are offered the opportunity to live together in community, caring for one another as we are, building a network of relationships within which we are one people.

Amen.

© 2025, Virginia H. Child