Day: May 25, 2025

May 25, 2025  First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield MA

Luke 18:9-14  

⁹ He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: ¹⁰ “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. ¹¹ The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. ¹² I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ ¹³ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ ¹⁴ I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other, for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

I John 4:16b-21 –

¹⁶ So we have known and believe the love that God has for us.  God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. ¹⁷ Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. ¹⁸ There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. ¹⁹ We love because he first loved us. ²⁰ Those who say, “I love God,” and hate a brother or sister are liars, for those who do not love a brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. ²¹ The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.

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.

Last week, Dean Sarah Drummond, of Andover Newton Seminary wrote this:

In his very fine graduation sermon this past weekend, Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School graduate Spencer Law. . . meditated on [the] words “Christ has broken down the wall”,  from a hymn by Mark A. Miller: 

Spencer argued that, even when we’re feeling like we can’t make a difference in our increasingly fractured world, there’s always another wall we can break down. We can detect where the words “they” and “them” prevail and focus our attention on breaking barriers that lead to “we” and “us.”

When I was about eight, we moved from living in town in South Jersey, to living on a farm in Pennsylvania, about halfway between Philly and Wilmington.

I quickly realized that I was living in a strange place…. For instance, my elementary school in Chadds Ford, wasn’t just on a bluff above the banks of the Brandywine Creek. (which was more like a small, slow-moving river)….  It was also a recovering battlefield from the Revolutionary War.  At recess time, kids would go down and play on the banks of the creek and come back up the bluff with bullets, old-fashioned round bullets, and sometimes other pieces of made metal.  Battlefields, for us, weren’t something we read about; they were where we lived and played.

My Quaker meeting, up the road a few miles, had been used as a hospital during the battle.  Instead of bullets, however, we had bodies.  Out behind the meeting house there was a mass grave, mixed American and British dead, buried together for eternity… and we had dark stains on our benches in the room where we worshipped.  The kids all thought those were blood stains.

The existence of war was a part of my childhood in a way that it isn’t up here in New England.  Sure, we have Patriot’s Day but unless you are part of that vanishingly small group of descendants of the men who fought at Lexington and Concord, it’s more of a play, a reproduction, a once-a-year event than living on the battlefield, with the daily reminders that produced.

I didn’t see the glamor of the uniforms, or hear the beat of the marching soldiers.  I saw the bullets and the blood and the deaths of both “us” and “them”.

When I was a Marine, I worked with a number of men who’d fought in the south Pacific, in places like Guadalcanal, or Iwo Jima or Okinawa and as a pastor I’ve met and known a number of men and women who fought in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.  They, of course, were the survivors, and this weekend our world remembers those who gave their all.  But the folks I knew were the witnesses to the truth that war, even when fought for the very best purposes – freeing the slaves, breaking away from England, driving a stake into the heart of fascism – is massively destructive.  

War is not just destructive to the land – if you go to France, you can still trace the lines of the World War I trenches – over a hundred years and the land is not yet healed – war does not just kill the fighters, not just break the survivors, but it hurts, damages every thing it touches.  

General William T. Sherman wrote:  “all war is hell”, and he was not exaggerating.  

Jesus told the story of the two men who went to worship one day – one of them coming with a broken heart, ready to admit to his problems, and the other, so sure of his perfection.  When I read that story, along with the lesson from 1 John.. that those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also… it seems to me that I’m reading about how wars begin, and – hopefully – how they end.

Wars begin when we focus more on what divides than what unites, when we’re more about how much better “I” am, than how much better it is when it’s “we” that we envision.  And wars end, and end well, when we are able to replace our self-importance with the practice of inclusive, welcoming love. 

The late Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said:  We are made for loving. If we don’t love, we will be like plants without water.  

Without love, we are no more than an unrelated pile of individual branches, none of them connected to another.  But with love, we become a strong tree, able to withstand the buffets and blows of life.  Living out our love is a constant struggle, because the natural tendency of human beings is towards greed and selfishness, for me first, and you only if there’s enough left over.

For centuries one of the major dividing lines in western Christianity has been the church – Protestants against Catholics, Catholics against Protestants…. And different kinds of Protestants against one another.  We lost focus on that call to love, and let the war mindset take over. 

Today, the United Church of Christ, our denominational family, has re-set our priorities and declares that all the church is one, that no part of the church is better or closer to God, than another.  We stand against the kind of dismissal that divides.

In the same way, we stand against the dismissals that divide in our public lives. 

You know, not all wars involve actually shooting people.  We’re engaged in a war right now, a war between those who believe that some people naturally deserve more and those who believe that everyone deserves a place at the table.  Some folks would say it’s a war between Republicans and Democrats, but I don’t think that’s true now, if it ever were.  Neither Republicans nor Democrats believe that some folks are better than others.  But there are people, people who maybe hide behind acceptable labels, who do think that we’d be better off with fewer people getting Medicaid, or food assistance, better off with lower taxes for the wealthy, and so on.  

That kind of attitude has always been a part of life.  The person who, down my way, tries to block access to the beach for their town, thinks they’re better, that they have more rights, and is a cousin to the one who thinks that because they have lots and lots of money that they matter more than anyone else.

You can see them now, coming to their church, sitting in “the best seat”, and expecting that the church is blessed by their presence, seeing no need to be the least bit humble.  And  you can see the folks next to them, the ones who’ve heard the story of love, who follow that path, welcoming everyone, treating all with love, refusing to go along to get along.

That’s who God is calling us to be, people who believe that everyone matters, people who know that hatred leads to destruction, people who let their love shine out.

Amen.

 © 2025, Virginia H. Child