Month: August 2025

August 24, 2025  First Congregational Church, Brimfield MA

Lk 13:10-17 ¹⁰ Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. ¹¹ And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. ¹² When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” ¹³ When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. ¹⁴ But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the Sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured and not on the Sabbath day.” ¹⁵ But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger and lead it to water? ¹⁶ And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?” ¹⁷ When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame, and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things being done by him.

“In times of war and in times of peace, the greatest weapons of all are not the arms you bear, but the arms you link.”  (from a UK observance of VJ Day )

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.

One of the quirks of Rhode Island life, one you might not have heard of, is that we observe the end of World War II with a state holiday named Victory Day.  State offices close, as do many towns and cities… but we still get mail.  It’s a little mixed, but it’s a time for us to remember and give thanks for the end of that terrible, all-consuming war.

This year I happened to come across a VJ Day celebration in England, and I heard one of the speakers say, “in times of war and in times of peace, the greatest weapons of all are not the arms you bear, but the arms you link.”  

That really struck me.  What makes for victory is not so much how powerful our weapons are, but how well we can stand together.  If you’ve ever served in the military, you’ve experienced how this plays out – all kinds of unit activities are designed, not just to keep us in good shape, but to help build a sense of solidarity.

With the importance of working together on my mind, I read today’s Gospel lesson.  You just heard it – the story of the healing of the bent-over woman.  The healing is a great story, but what struck me this time as I read it, was how it almost fell apart because the leaders of the local religious establishment got upset because Jesus healed on the sabbath.

Now, we all know that this isn’t a story about how Jews complained about violating the sabbath, while the good Christians would never have done such a thing.  Whining about breaking the rules is the sort of thing that transcends the walls that divide.  Everyone does it, from time to time.  But, at our best, and when we’re following Jesus’ example, we let the need for a different way transcend our love of the “way it’s always been”, and we move ahead in God’s way.

And that’s what today is about.  Moving ahead, in God’s way, as best we understand that way.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been talking about how our world has changed, and how those changes are changing us, how we do things, and even what things we do.  One of those changes began to affect us today – we are doing music differently, and doing that for at least two reasons:

First, no one responded to our ads for an organist.

And second, with all that needs to be done, our leaders decided to suspend the search for a new musician temporarily.  

Where we are now is temporary; we’ve not turned away from having a musician, but we need time to figure out what that’s going to look like, and how to search for that person.

In the meantime, we are moving ahead.  But I don’t want to talk about the ways we’re moving ahead today.  Today I want us to think about how hard it is to deal with the changes that happen when our world changes.

Dealing with change is a real challenge… even when everyone agrees that a change is necessary, important, and good.  

Some years ago, my cousins down on the farm in Woodstock changed the location of the main driveway into the farm.  For centuries (the farm’s been there for close to 300 years), the drive had come up from the road, right past the farmhouse, and then onto the barns, milk house and so on.  Cars came up the drive to visit at the house, feed truck came up the drive, bringing food for the cows, and milk tank trucks came up the drive to pick up milk… there was dust everywhere.  The house was the first thing you saw, and people stopped in all the time, looking for my uncle, dropping stuff off, and so on.

So, my cousins moved the drive, maybe 100 feet over.  Now when you drive in, the first thing you see is the Woodstock Creamery building, where they sell milk and other dairy products.  You can still see the house, but you have to make an intentional turn to go to it… so there’s a lot less traffic by the house, lots less dust, lots more privacy.  It’ makes all the sense in the world.  I’m sure I’m not the only family member who wonders why on earth our ancestors didn’t put the drive there in the first place.

It’s the right thing in the right place, right?  And yet, every time I drive by, it feels wrong.  I went up that drive with my grandparents, and with my parents, and then my aunt, when she and her husband ran the farm.  I know in my heart what the crunch of the gravel sounds like, and how the lilac my great-grandmother planted when she married and came over from Pomfret, would brush the roofs of cars – and how it had to be cut back periodically to keep from blocking the drive.  The trip up the drive was the end of the long drive from New Jersey to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family… it’s just packed full of memories, and it no longer exists.  That’s hard.

It’s always hard when change comes.  And it’s perfectly reasonable to miss what used to be.  And it’s ok to mourn the things in the past that we loved.

That religious leader who snapped at Jesus because he was violating the Sabbath had lost sight of what his rule, his practice was supposed to be about.  

Everything we do here has to do with being in the presence of God, has to do with helping others find value in their lives, with helping people be good and do good.  Our practices are not our goals, they are the means to our goals.  No matter how much we loved what we did in the past, if it no longer works to help us meet our goals, then it’s time to look around and see what might be a better way for this current time.

And it’ll be time to let go of complaining because the past no longer exists.  There is very little that is more discouraging than working hard to create a sustainable future and having people pick away at the work because their favorite “whatever” is no longer happening, or is now different.  It’s time to take what we have and figure out how to make it better, rather than getting upset that yesterday’s practice no longer works.

As we grow and evolve into our future, we’re going to hold on tight to what matters – God, love, community, service.  We’re going to keep our hearts, our minds, our eyes open to how that works in today’s world.  

We will let go of what has us bent over, and seek the things that will allow us to stand up and serve God, all our days.

Amen.

© 2025, Virginia H. Child

August 3, 2025 Joint Worship Service in Southbridge MA

Luke 18:1–8 

Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. ² He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. ³ In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my accuser.’ ⁴ For a while he refused, but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, ⁵ yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’ ” ⁶ And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. ⁷ And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? ⁸ I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

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.

We are the luckiest people in the world.

Look all around us… look at this beautiful day, this beautiful place… see that we’re here with friends new and long-standing, gathered to worship God and to have fun together.  

It could have been 95, right?

It could have been raining.

This is New England; it could just as easily be 62… and raining….

Being together, sharing food, playing games, caring for one another, listening to stories about God, this is as close to heaven as we can get.

And that’s important to remember, because so much of our world stinks.

Sometimes life is so hard it’s almost unendurable.

Maybe for you the hard part is going on out in the world.  Maybe it’s a challenge at home.  

Maybe part of it is that it seems as though you ought to be handling this better – after all you’re a church-going person!  Maybe it feels as though you’re making too much of what’s happening, other people pooh-pooh your concerns?

But here, in this place, in this company we are committed to naming the truth of our world.

If you’re seeing challenges, know they are real.  We don’t need to agree on what those problems are to know that they are real problems. 

We can be on different sides of arguments and still know that arguing hurts.  

The Gospel lesson today is the story of a woman who knows she has a problem — and a judge who wants to pretend the problem doesn’t exist, so he won’t have to do anything.  He’s got all the power; she has none.  And her complaining, her petitioning, doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere.

You can see how this might fit in with today.  We see bad things happening.  And though we go to God in prayer, we don’t see changes – just like the woman, it’s as if no one cares.

Maybe a hundred years ago, a little girl got the measles.  She was a bright little thing, the apple of her family’s eye, the last of five children.  But she got the measles, and – as sometimes happens even now – her measles turned into encephalitis.  And encephalitis meant irreversible damage to her brain.  She was no longer a bright, happy little child.  She wasn’t bright at all, and more and more frequently was taken by uncontrollable bursts of temper.  Her family was horrified, and then they were terrified.  In tears and defeat, their beloved daughter went to live at a state school and there she died when she was six.

Some twenty years later, her oldest sister had a baby who turned out to have cognitive limitations.  When the medical folks said she and her husband should put the baby away at the state school, she remembered her sister, and said . . No.  We can do this hard thing. And they did.  They kept their daughter home, educated her to her fullest capacity, taught her to be a loving and responsible member of society.

More than that, she worked to make life better for all the other children born with cognitive limitations.  She fought to educate people so they wouldn’t be afraid of kids with challenges, fought to create a system of dispersed residences, so children who needed that kind of care would not have to go so far away.  She fought to create respectable jobs, and then to create homes in smaller, more family-sized groups.  (She didn’t do this alone; there was a whole team.  But she was a sparkplug who made things happen.)

Someone once urged her to go to one of those faith healing crusades, saying that with prayer, God would heal her daughter, make her whole.  The parents both said, our daughter is whole; this is who she is, and healing her, changing her, just isn’t going to happen.  We aren’t going to make her think we don’t love her as she is.  Besides, she would never understand when nothing changed.  It would break her heart.

But every day, with God’s guidance, those parents did heal their daughter.

They healed her from society’s contempt.  

They healed her from the expectation that she couldn’t learn, couldn’t contribute to society.  

They even healed her from the expectation that her physical problems would see her dead before she was twenty.  

Instead she lived out a full life.  And at the same time, their efforts healed the world for others – other young people didn’t have to leave home when they were little kids, other affected people were able to get jobs.  I just looked it up the other day – reports say that there are almost 15,000 people under the care of her state; every one of them, and every family member, has a better life because of the efforts of that young woman beset with tragedy as a teen, and then again as a young mother.  Healing isn’t about fixing the broken thing; it’s about making good out of tragedy.

So, here’s the thing to remember today:  God is not an unjust judge, only responding because we’ve annoyed him for too long.  God loves us, creates us out of love, leads and guides and comforts us, out of love. We know God is going to be standing right beside us, no matter how terrible the day.

God stands with us.

God isn’t our creature, doesn’t make “everything all right” like some kind of cheap magic trick, as if we’ve bought healing from God.

God doesn’t remake the world to our specifications.  

God has put us in a world that has infinite possibility for good, and an equally infinite possibility of horror or evil.  We have been given the potential; it is our work to make good, to create love, to live in joy, out of the day-to-day realities of our world.  And we do all that work knowing that God is at our side, offering the gifts of patience, persistence, vision, courage, companionship and love.

If I’m not clear yet, we are the most fortunate of people because God has given each of us a life worth living, given each of us ways to make our world better, no so much for ourselves, but for our communities, our neighbors, our families, ourselves.  And when the worst happens, our God will not leave us alone.

Amen.

© 2025, Virginia H. Child