Month: October 2025

October 26, 2025  First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield MA

Luke 18:9-14 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.”

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.

When I was writing this sermon, I found myself listening to an old Bill Gaither video, where folks were singing “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus”… you know this old gospel tune.  

I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back, no turning back…  so beautiful, sung very slowly, very emotional..  

And then I began to listen to the next video.  The same song, this time sung by an African artist.  The tempo was much more vigorous, some of the words in French or Yoruba.   

I found 4 or 5 different versions of this song, each of them slightly different.  In one, everyone there was singing, like a congregation; in another, a soloist used the song as the underlying foundation for an emotional altar call, in a third, the song was played simply and quietly on the harp.

In each, we were focused on the meaning of the words – even the harp solo, when I expect almost everyone heard the words in their heads, even though they weren’t spoken.  And so that’s where we’re starting today.  This is our first answer to the question, what does God expect of us?

God expects us to follow Jesus. 

And there’s more than one right way to do that, just as there’s more than one right way to sing that song.  Moreover, just because a way appeals to me, that doesn’t mean it has to appeal to everyone the same way.  God expects us to follow Jesus in the way that each of us finds bringing us closer to living out Jesus’ way.

That means we’re expected to take following God seriously.  It’s not just a “Sunday only” thing.  We who have made promises, at our baptisms, when we joined this church, have set our feet on the path of going further in, higher up, continuing to learn more, allowing the changes of our lives to change how we follow, but not to erase our commitment.

In one of my churches, I heard the story of one member who – throughout all the years – had been one of the church’s leaders, who’d spent years organizing their food pantry, reaching out to those in need.  But in her later years, she was no longer able to do those things, they told me, and for a while she felt out of it… but then she joined the team who kept track of the folks in the church who lived alone.  Every morning, she phoned people – and for all practical purposes, her work was to make sure they were still alive, or – to call for help if they didn’t answer the phone.  She couldn’t drive, didn’t have much money, but until her own dying day, she could, and did, make phone calls. 

God expects us to be active, to do, according to our gifts, according to our abilities and resources.

God expects us to recognize that we won’t always do the right thing, that we have a tendency to take care of ourselves first, to be greedy about who gets the last slice of cake, to lose our tempers, and sometimes, to be mean.

Because, you know, we can’t do better if we can’t admit where we’re falling short of our goal.  That’d be as if six of us decided to race from here to the Cumbies down the road, but I only made it to the front door, and then said, well that was the real goal, and I’ve won because everyone else ran to another place.  Or it’d be as if I got angry at Deb Christensen because she pointed out that I’d forgotten something, without taking responsibility for not making notes and remembering… or if I got upset with my music teacher because I’m not getting better, when I’m not practicing.  

I can’t get better until I admit where I’m falling short of the goal, whatever that goal is.  And God expects us to face the places where we fall short of God’s ideal, our own goals, with honestly, and forgiveness.

In fact, God gives us a safe place where we can be real, so this expectation is a genuine gift.

God expect us to focus our energies on serving others.  That means we factor in our commitment when planning our lives.  We set aside time to serve, or energy to serve.  We set aside resources to support that service.  We step away from things and activities which limit our ability to respond.  We budget our time, our talents, our financial resources to make the best use of those things as we follow God.

This means we don’t give God what’s left over at the end of the week.  When we plan our days out, we make choices – we have the time for “this thing” or “that thing”, but we can’t do both .  We can no more do everything we want than I can eat all the apple cider donuts I’d like.  

So we set aside time for God, time to pray, time to come to worship and fellowship, time to serve our world in some way or another, each of us according to our abilities.

We set aside time to serve God’s church.  One of my colleagues was telling me the other day that they were travelling to a church we both know, to meet with the church’s moderator, and to resources him and the church as they rewrite their bylaws.  I was struck by the fact that this person she’s going to meet with is a retired successful trial lawyer who, in addition to being the church moderator is also the moderator of the Town Meeting where he lives.  He has made it clear, serving the church is part of his commitment to following Jesus, and plans out his time and energy to make it happen.

In one of my Maine churches, we had a member who – until he retired – had been a baker down in Portland.  He loved people, and one of the ways he lived out his faith was by being the greeter every Sunday, and connecting our visitors with people who were already here – someone one would come, maybe from Washington DC, and Horace would connect him with a member who’d just moved up from that area.  Horace didn’t have a ton of money, but he had an exuberant personality and a great memory for faces.  He was a gift to the church.  

And God expects us to use a portion of our money to help support the church.  There’s a lot of confusion about this, you know.  Some folks think that if they can’t give thousands of dollars, that their gift is meaningless.  That’s just not so.  

God expects us to give out of our resources, but not to beggar ourselves.  If you have a lot of money, then give a lot of money.  If you don’t, then don’t.  Give what works for you.  Just do it, however, as a plan, not something we do with our leftovers, but as something that’s important to us, a sign of our decision to follow Jesus.

There’s one more thing God expects of us.  God expects us to take God seriously, to make this commitment an active part of our lives, to give of our time, our talents and our money, and finally, God expects us to live believing that every person in the world is someone to be loved, welcome and respected.  

Be real, let your deeds be your proclamation.  Don’t think you’re better than others, like that guy in the Gospel reading this morning.  No one’s perfect.  But we can still try.  We can do our best, we can apologize when we hurt others and then we can try again.  That’s how we show God’s love, that’s how we build a strong church community.  That’s how we follow Jesus – all the way, no turning back.

I’m going to close this morning with a prayer written by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, who was Archbishop of Canterbury almost 500 years ago.  You might know him as the principal author of the Book of Common Prayer.  He was executed under the reign of Queen Mary because he was a leader of the Protestant Reformation.  This prayer was written sometime before 1554 and it does a superb job of describing what God wants of us.  

Let us pray:

“Merciful Father in heaven, give us your grace and help to love our neighbors from the heart, and to always do them good—both in words and deeds. Grant that we may live purely, avoiding offense to others, and provoking no one to unclean living. Help us to encourage others to honesty.  May we help others to save and keep what they have. And if they live in poverty, help us to relieve them as we are able.  May we never hurt others with a false witness, but instead always speak well of our neighbor.  Keep us from evil lusts and desires, never wanting what belongs to others.  For this is your will, and you have commanded us to be obedient. Amen.”

Amen.

© 2025, Virginia H. Child

October 19, 2025  First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield 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.

How does it make  you feel when you hear this story?  Have you ever found yourself mired in a no win situation, where prayer is all that’s left, and it’s not working?  I know I have.  And I have to say, when I’m in that place, reading this particular parable, story, isn’t all that helpful.  It kinda feels like a condemnation of my ability to pray.  Do you know what I mean?  If only I were more persistent, if only I were stronger, then that unjust judge would respond.

Now, all the scholars are united in the idea that when Jesus told this story, what he wanted us to know is that God is ever so much more faithful than the unjust judge, and that God will give us what we ask for.  It’s just that I’m not sure, at least for myself, that his idea works today the way he intended.

And so, I want to turn the story inside out and see if it doesn’t make more sense that way.

Here’s what I mean:

We always hear this as the story of the poor believer begging the mean judge to listen to them, right?  But what happens if we think of it as if the widow is actually God, begging an unbelieving person to listen for God’s love?  What if we’re like the judge and God is like the widow?

It seems to me that when we turn the story inside out, it becomes a story of a loving God who never gives up calling us to be our best selves.  It becomes a story that helps us understand just who we are and who we can be.  And that’s really good news.

Last fall, when I had just come here, I began treatment for type 2 diabetes.  I should have known that it was coming.  My dad was diabetic, his sister was diabetic, my brother is, too, but like many folks (see how I’m excusing my choices?) I chose to ignore those road signs, and continued not only to eat what I wanted, and as much as I wanted, but paid no attention to my weight.  And I knew that, while for some, my weight wouldn’t be a problem, for my health it was… well, I’d certainly heard the doctor say that, but I can’t quite say honestly that I paid it much attention.

So, there I was, closing my ears to the persistent comments of my (very good) primary care physician.  Like the judge in the story, I didn’t want to hear anything that would mean giving up all the foods I loved.  

Mean people like being mean the same way people like me like to eat donuts.  We don’t think about the consequences.  In fact, we really don’t think consequences exist.

But God is like that widow woman.  She saw the consequences of what was going on.  She saw mistreatment, she saw that her world was not operating along God’s principles, but rather along the desires and wants of selfish and greedy people.  And so she kept on knocking at the door, kept on reminding him that there was more to the world than his selfish wants and desires, kept on loving him.

That’s the good news for today.  No matter how hard we work to close our eyes to the parts of life we don’t want to see, no matter how we turn away from the needs of others to satisfy the wants in our own hearts, God will persist.  

What’s wrong will never be right. What’s right will never change.  

Sure, it’s easier to keep on doing what feels good, what satisfies our surface wants. But when we do that, we’re just skimming off the un-nourishing parts of life, making our lives something like living on the icing on the cake.

It’s when we dig in and live a whole life, recognizing the good and the bad, standing up and naming when things are wrong, it’s then that we’re fully nourished, and growing into our real identity as Christians.

It’s not easy.  It’s easy to close your eyes to evil, it’s easy to say there’s nothing to see here.  Being a Christian means keeping your eyes open not just to pretty trees and great cider donuts – it’s means noticing when someone cringes at the sound of a gunshot, or when someone is still wearing a tatty sweater in January – does that mean they don’t have a coat?  

Being a Christian is about not just noticing but also working towards making things better.  So we feed the hungry at Dismas House.  We collected school supplies to help kids and teachers.  We open the doors of this church so that folks can come in and experience unconditional love.  We continue to learn to pay attention, to hear the ways in which people hurt, and to do what we can to build a community where we can love and care for one another. 

It isn’t easy, but it’s the faithful way to go.  Today’s story reminds us that we have choices in our world.  We can be like that unjust judge, ignoring the pain of others and only responding when we begin to get annoyed by their persistence.  We can take that easy path.

Or we can take the hard way, the challenging way, the way that calls us to pay attention, to take action, to be representatives of God’s unfailing love, here in our church, in our families, in our world.

Which will it be – the easy way or the hard way?

Amen.

© 2025, Virginia H. Child

October 5, 2025  First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield MA

Lamentations 1:1-6

How lonely sits the city that once was full of people! 
How like a widow she has become, she that was great among the nations! 
She that was a princess among the provinces has become subject to forced labor. 
² She weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks; 
among all her lovers, she has no one to comfort her; 
all her friends have dealt treacherously with her; they have become her enemies. 
³ Judah has gone into exile with suffering and hard servitude; 
she lives now among the nations; she finds no resting place; 
her pursuers have all overtaken her in the midst of her distress. 
⁴ The roads to Zion mourn, for no one comes to the festivals; 
all her gates are desolate; her priests groan; 
her young girls grieve, and her lot is bitter. 
⁵ Her foes have become the masters; her enemies prosper 
because the Lord has made her suffer 
for the multitude of her transgressions; 
her children have gone away, captives before the foe. 
⁶ From daughter Zion has departed all her majesty. 
Her princes have become like stags that find no pasture; 
they fled without strength before the pursuer.

Luke 17:5-10 (The Message)
The apostles came up and said to the Master, “Give us more faith.” But the Master said, “You don’t need more faith. There is no ‘more’ or ‘less’ in faith. If you have a bare kernel of faith, say the size of a [mustard seed] poppy seed, you could say to this sycamore tree, ‘Go jump in the lake,’ and it would do it.

“Suppose one of you has a servant who comes in from plowing the field or tending the sheep. Would you take his coat, set the table, and say, ‘Sit down and eat’? Wouldn’t you be more likely to say, ‘Prepare dinner; change your clothes and wait table for me until I’ve finished my coffee; then go to the kitchen and have your supper’? Does the servant get special thanks for doing what’s expected of him? It’s the same with you. When you’ve done everything expected of you, be matter-of-fact and say, ‘The work is done. What we were told to do, we did.’ ”

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.

Are you afraid of the dark?  Hmm?  Well, maybe not so much these days, but how about those doctor’s visits where they say “Let’s just check that out, in case”, and you wait on tenterhooks for the results from a test, or two, or three.  Maybe that situation strikes fear in your hearts?

There’s a connection, you know, between those fears we had as kids, the ones our parents tried to tell us weren’t real, and the fears we face as grown-ups, the fears we know are real.  Joe Hill, the son of Stephen King, who also writes horror stories like his dad’s… says that kids instinctively know that evil is real, that bad things can happen.  Hill adds

People believe—want to believe—in a moral universe, a universe that confirms the existence of the human soul, a thing of incalculable worth that can be won or lost. If that heightened moral universe doesn’t exist in reality. . . then we will search for it in fiction. We don’t want to flee “’Salem’s Lot.” We want to live there.

Evil is inflicted upon every life; what a relief it would be if it took an (in)human form and could be dragged out of its coffin and into the sunlight, to die screaming and in flames. 

AIDS, SIDS, pollution, global warming, drug addiction: To be human is to find oneself confronted with vast, terrible forces that lack form, that can’t be fought in any literal sense, hand-to-hand, stake to heart. That doesn’t satisfy us. 

It’s fine if there’s evil, wickedness, cruelty. We just want it to have a point. If we’re in this fight, we want to know there’s an enemy out there — not just bad luck and grinding, impersonal historical forces. 

More than that, though: Once you give evil a face and fangs, once you give it agency, it becomes possible to imagine a force opposed against it, a light that can drive out shadow.]

Once you give evil a face and fangs, once you give it agency, it becomes possible to imagine a force opposed against it, a light that can drive out shadow.

In our reading from Lamentations, Jeremiah wrote:   She that was a princess among the provinces has become subject to forced labor. ² She weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks; among all her lovers, she has no one to comfort her; all her friends have dealt treacherously with her; they have become her enemies. 

It seems as though Stephen King and Joe Hill are not the only ones who know that evil exists, and maybe not the only ones who’ve noticed that it is only when we name the existence of evil that we are able to fight against it.

You don’t need to be very old at all to know that unspeakably bad things can happen to the best of people.  Toddlers, first-graders, they’re not too young to know – even if they don’t really know what happened, they’ll know that their parents are suffering and they know that’s bad.  

Here’s the thing:  if we learned as little ones to pretend the bad isn’t there, then how will we know how to deal with the bad as adults?  

This is important, because it’s true that unless we admit that something bad exists, we’ve not a chance in the world of making things better. 

That’s why we read the Bible.  Because it tells us the truth about life.  It’s not about facts and science, and not even really the facts of history.  It’s about truth, about the reality of evil and the power of love.

This is one of the ways we, as Christians, differ from much of our world.  We live in a society which believes that people are good, until they’re not – so that people are either good or despicable, with no in-between.  We live in a world that tells us if we do all the good things, always right, that nothing but good things will happen to us.   And then, when it turns out that’s not true, folks get angry as if they’ve been cheated.  We live in a world where people believe that gods, like our God, exist to protect us from every bad thing, and so when bad happens, it’s all our gods’ faults,… you’ve heard this when someone cries out “How could God have let this happen to me?”

There’s a truth about life that we miss when we expect everything to always be good.  And that truth is simple:  things go bad.  We often struggle.  And it’s all so much harder to deal with if, at the same time, we have to pretend that all is well, or supposed to be well.

Years ago, I went to the hospital to visit an older relative; as it turned out, she not only had pneumonia, but dementia.  I realized that our conversation was going to be different when she began to explain to me that the hospital roof, which she could see from her room, was dotted with rocket ships.  Now, you or I might have thought those were chimneys, but that explanation couldn’t work for her because she’d lost the meaning of chimneys.  So she made do with what she still had and tried to make sense of the world she saw.  But she didn’t know, couldn’t know, and so she created this fantastic world of rockets, and then strange people – all in her attempt to make sense of her world.

Or think of the woman who, after years of back pain, went to the umpteenth doctor to try to figure it out and this time, science had advanced enough that they were able to discover that she had a congenital malformation of her back.  Her head wasn’t really connected well to her back; any hard whack could have turned her into a paraplegic.  Surgery has repaired the problem and now she’s in a much better place – all because then finally really knew what had happened and how to fix it.

Really knowing that evil exists, helps us see our world as it is.  When we think it’s all supposed to be good, and isn’t, we can blame ourselves, our families, our world.  

Today is World Communion Sunday; a day when we remember that Communion is a sign of our unity, not just here in our church, not even just within the United Church of Christ, but unity with all believers all around the world.  Again, it’s an opportunity to see beyond the surface, to learn that reality is not the same as appearance.  We look like – and politically, are – divided on many things, but in reality, those of us who focus on the unity of Communion see a togetherness upon which we can build.

In Luke, we heard the story of some apostles who were asking for “more faith”.  Jesus responded that they already had all the faith they needed, that the challenge for them was that they didn’t understand that faith wasn’t some sort of special gift for special times; instead, faith is sustenance for every day.  They asked for more because they couldn’t see what was already there.  Again, it’s a message to us that we need to pay attention to what’s really happening in order to understand our work, our life.

The lesson for today is clear:  there is a reality to evil which permeates our world; pretending it’s not there is disorienting,  In Jesus, we can live in the reality of a faith that overcomes evil, that brings us together despite our differences.

Amen.

© 2025, Virginia H. Child