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
To Believe is to Care. . . To Care is to Do 