Month: January 2026

January 18, 2026  First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield MA

Isaiah 49:1-7       I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

John 1:29-42      The next day [John] saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ I myself did not know him, but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.” And John testified, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Chosen One.” The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by he exclaimed, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, “What are you looking for?” They said to him, “Rabbi” (which translated means Teacher), “where are you staying?” He said to them, “Come and see.” They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He first found his brother Simon and said to him, “We have found the Messiah” (which is translated Anointed). He brought Simon to Jesus, who looked at him and said, “You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas” (which is translated Peter).

“Love is the greatest force in the universe. It is the heasrtbeat of the moral cosmos. He who loves is a participant in the being of God.” Martin Luther King

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.

Behold the Lamb of God…  It’s the earliest proclamation of Jesus Christ, naming him as the one who will sacrifice all to change the world for us.  For sure, John’s followers heard exactly what he was saying.  You’ve heard me say before that there were folks who followed John and folks who followed Jesus – there was something of a competition between the two camps.  The story today is about a time when people came to John to ask who to follow – was it still John, or was Jesus even more important, closer to God.  

John’s answer was “behold the Lamb of God”, the one who will be so transformed by love that he will change our world.  It’s Jesus who shows us that love is not free, not easy, and sometimes can cost your life.

John often spoke of Jesus.  In the very beginning, the prologue to John’s Gospel, he says, “No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known. ^[1]  

From that we learn that one of the things Jesus does is reflect to us God’s love, God’s essence.   The way the theologians describe this is to say that God was incarnate in Jesus – Jesus was both a human being and also God.  And Jesus is now a kind of model, a pattern for us, to help us do our best to live as he did. We are the only visible proof that God exists; people form their ideas of what God is, from seeing how we live and work, talk and act.

And that means reflecting God’s love in our lives. 

I’m not telling you anything new.  You know all this.  Visitors get what kind of God we worship when they not only hear what I say, but experience how you welcome new people.  If, in your interactions, you reflect Jesus’ accepting love, then they feel welcome.  This happens every day in our lives. 

It works the other way, too.  I remember the story I heard years ago that the leader of the local Christian Men’s Fellowship was a man who maintained two families – told to me with contempt by a man who’d left not just the fellowship, but the church he belongs to, where that man was the Head Deacon.  Everyone knew what was happening, and no one would do anything about it.  The guy who told me the story was not the only person who walked away from church.

Think about how many people have left the Roman Catholic Church.  Twenty-five years ago, almost a quarter of all Americans were Catholic; today it’s less than 20%.  Every person in this room probably has friends and family who once were Catholic and some of us are part of the group that left that faith for this way of being Christian.  

Turn it around:  how many people have come to faith, joined a church (of any denomination) because they met someone who so radiated the extravagant welcome of Jesus Christ that they couldn’t not join.  In a former church, for instance, a parishioner told me of her nephew, a Naval officer, who’d become a Mormon because he so appreciated the moral life of Mormon offiers.  Or in another conversation a Marine sergeant told me how, when he’d been in combat, he’d been so affected by the faith/bravery of the Catholic chaplains that he became a Catholic.  That, he said, was how he wanted to live.

When I first walked into a Congregational Church, Grace UCC, in Rutland, VT; the first two people I recognized were my very kind ophthalmologist and the woman who always greeted me with a smile at the grocery store when she was checking my groceries out.  I knew right then that if these two people were representative of the folks in that church, it was a good place.

We are here to reflect God’s love, shown to us in Jesus Christ, to all the world.

Not a squishy, get everything you want, kind of love, indulgent, spoiled, but that love that helps us tell good from bad, name and recognize evil, celebrate the best among us.

Reflecting God’s love is not always easy, not always safe.  Martin Luther King Jr was reflecting God’s love when he said “Love is the greatest force in the universe. It is the heartbeat of the moral cosmos. He who loves is a participant in the being of God.”  And he tried to live that out.. leading the Birmingham Bus Boycott, supporting all kinds of non-violent actions against racism, in the South and the North.  When he was murdered, he was in Memphis to bring light to the way that garbage workers were oppressed.  Bringing light can be dangerous.

We’ve heard so much lately about what’s happening in our country these days.  But just as those who came before us condemned the evil of fire hoses and police dogs attacking Black citizens who fought for equality… people, Christians, are naming evil and standing up against it in many places across our country.  Not just liberal denominations like ours, but conservative Christians as well are troubled by what they see and hear.  It’s our more conservative siblings who remind us that John the Baptist warned the tax collectors not to misuse their power, not to oppress people, that the Bible actually preaches against abusees of those who are poor, weak, or powerless.

In fact you’ll remember that Paul abused the church with the full participation of the law right up to the moment he met Jesus on the Road to Damascus, and realized how wrong he had been.  

The events of the past weeks have shown us that sometimes standing up against evil, truly reflecting God’s love can be dangerous. New Hampshire Episcopal Bishop Rob Hirschfeld spoke out, and was quoted by WMUR, the NPR station in New Hampshire:

In Hirschfeld’s speech, he talks about past martyrs who have died for their cause. He said New Hampshire clergy members should get their affairs in order and their wills written as they defend the vulnerable.

“Now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable,” Hirschfeld said.

He told News 9 that his words reflected a consistent message he has shared: to live without fear and to know that God’s love is stronger than injustice or death. He said he has been surprised by the response to that message.

“But I think the context is everything, that we’re living in a different era now, and that is opening up our ears and our hearts to this message, which is both ancient and new,” he said.

Hirschfeld said he and other members of the clergy are not looking for violence, but he said these are times in which their job of working with the vulnerable comes at a risk.^[2]

Most of the time, however, we’re not being called to lay our literal lives on the line,  Most of the time, what we’re called to is more every-day, less exciting, more subtle:  Wear a “I’m a gay ally” pin.  Help someone stuck by the side of the road.  Sit with someone who is mourning. Ignore that bully.  Walk away from the conversation where folks are making fun of people of color, or queer people.  Be the people that bring people to church because they want to be like you. 

Show God, in all God’s glory, to the world around us.

Amen.

©2026, Virginia H. Child

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^[1] New Revised Standard Version: Updated Edition (Friendship Press, 2021), Jn 1:18.

^[2] https://www.wmur.com/article/ice-shooting-nh-episcopal-bishop-speech-011226/69980984

January 11, 2026  First Congregational Church of Brimfield MA

Acts 10:34-43 Then Peter began to speak to them: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every people anyone who fears him and practices righteousness is acceptable to him. You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ—he is Lord of all. That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”

Matthew 3:13-17 Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you,  and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw God’s Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from the heavens said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased. 

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.

About 25 or so years ago, I was called to serve South Congregational UCC, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I could tell you a lot of stories about South Church, but this morning I want to talk about what it was like to move to Grand Rapids.

The first thing you should know is that Grand Rapids, Michigan, is one of the cleanest cities you might ever live in.  Western Michigan’s European settlers largely came from the Netherlands, and the whole area reflects the values of industry and tidiness from that land.  

Grand Rapids was also one of the most diverse places I’ve ever lived – lots and lots of people who’d emigrated from South and Central America, lots and lots of Black folks who’d moved north to Detroit and then west to our part of the state, lots and lots of Native Americans – or at least more, many more, than I was accustomed to knowing here in southern New England.

And the UCC was not the “First Church” culture… tho we did have “First Churches”; Congregationalists had helped settle Grand Rapids.  But the most influential, most prominent churches in Grand Rapids were Christian Reformed – Dutch churches.  Unlike in New England, we were not the church that made the town happen.  Religious diversity meant, among other things, that we had at least separate school systems – public schools, Roman Catholic schools, Lutheran schools, Christian Reformed schools, and other conservative Protestant schools.

I was lost at first.  All those differences were great, but they were also confusing.  Never mind the theological differences – the food in the grocery stores was different.  What people wore was different. The jokes they told were different.  They had beaches like we do, but the water was fresh, from Lake Michigan – it looked like the ocean, but it didn’t smell right or taste right.

And then there were the theological issues.  And the different ways the churches were organized.  Assumptions I had about how things worked were tested, and I will tell you I came out of the experience with a new and deeper understanding of church leadership and ministry.

My first few months, tho, were a time of wandering, a time when I had to re-think who I was and what I was doing there.  

One of the things I learned there was, if you don’t really know who you are and why you’re there, you’re going to find things really difficult.  

Today’s lessons are all about learning who you are, and living out of that knowledge.  The lessons are all about baptism, what it means for us, what it does to us, and how it helps us grow into what God has intended us to be.

When people all around us are calling us to go here, or do that, it’s the fact of our baptism that guides us to making good choices.

We understand that the story of Jesus’ baptism in Matthew marks the beginning of his public ministry, and so it’s important to remember that the way Matthew tells the story, it’s at that time that God claims Jesus as his son.  The thing is, that’s also what happens when we’re baptized.  Whether we were tiny babies or full adults, whether we were dipped into water and got totally immersed, or it was a small amount of water poured or sprinkled… no matter the method, baptism is the time when God declares that we are each of us God’s beloved child.

So the next thing is to be clear about what it means to be God’s beloved child.  It’s clear, the job description for our life as God’s beloved children, is right there in the Scripture – “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil”  We do what Jesus did.  We go around doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil.

What might that look like?  Really, you know that already.  

Doing good isn’t complicated; it’s just hard – and well, yes, it can be complicated.  Years ago, I was serving a church that developed a real problem while doing good.  We lived in one of the towns where Massachusetts used to send homeless people to live in our motels. Our churches banded together to help those homeless folks and most of the time that worked about as well as you’d expect.  But once, one of the homeless people came to church, accompanied by a cute kid.  Folks in the church were generous.  They gave her food, clothes, toys for the kid, ride, tried to arrange an apartment for her….   That might seem great, but none of us really understood the dynamics of social work, or the needs and desires of the homeless.  It nearly broke our hearts when we discovered she was selling the stuff we gave her, and selling drugs as well and that almost every good thing we’d tried to do ended up failing.    We do good, but we need to be sure we’re doing the right thing at the right time for the right reasons.

Gathering special gifts for the family turned out to be hard because we didn’t do the real work of studying and learning everything we could before we jumped in with both feet.

In the midst of all the complications, it’s important to remember that we have resources to help us figure out what is out of whack, what needs to be done, what we can bring to the problem, and teach us how to use our resources in the most effective, faithful way.  

It’s important to remember than we, having been baptized, are not left without help.  

Baptism tells us who we are and what we’re called to do.  

It tells us that our work, our calling, is to use our hearts and our minds and all our energies to counter the many and various ways that evil and oppression show up in our world.  

For you and I, we have been baptized, and commissioned in order to love all God’s loved children —  in all this crazy world.

Amen.

January 4, 2026 Epiphany Sunday, First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield MA

Isaiah 60:1-6 Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. ² For darkness shall cover the earth and thick darkness the peoples, but the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you. ³ Nations shall come to your light and kings to the brightness of your dawn. ⁴ Lift up your eyes and look around; they all gather together; they come to you; your sons shall come from far away, and your daughters shall be carried in their nurses’ arms. ⁵ Then you shall see and be radiant; your heart shall thrill and rejoice, because the abundance of the sea shall be brought to you; the wealth of the nations shall come to you. ⁶ A multitude of camels shall cover you, the young camels of Midian and Ephah; all those from Sheba shall come. They shall bring gold and frankincense and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord.

Matthew 2:1-12 In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, magi from the east came to Jerusalem, ² asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star in the east and have come to pay him homage.” ³ When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him, ⁴ and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. ⁵ They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea, for so it has been written by the prophet: 

⁶ ‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, 
are by no means least among the rulers of Judah, 
for from you shall come a ruler 
who is to shepherd my people Israel.’ ” 

⁷ Then Herod secretly called for the magi and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. ⁸ Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.” ⁹ When they had heard the king, they set out, and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen in the east, until it stopped over the place where the child was. ¹⁰ When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. ¹¹ On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. ¹² And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.

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.

Mind the Light.

Not just any lightbulb, but that Light about which our Scripture speaks this morning.  

It’s Epiphany time – even though the official Epiphany Day is the 6^th, we’re celebrating it today – that’s why we read the story of the arrival of the Wise Men this morning.  The Wise Men followed a Star to the baby’s side; and it’s that Light we’re going to explore this morning.

Mind the Light.

Matthew’s story tells us that three scholars came out of the East – that is, from Iran (Persia, in those days), and maybe even from India – to tell the story of what they had learned.  In the story, because this is how they understood scholars, the three men are described as magi, or astrologers, people who today we’d discount considerably, and probably not listen to… but back then, they were enormously important people, who the story said had travelled far distances to honor the newborn king.  

For us, today, the important thing to note is that all this begins with Light.  They say, “we saw a bright star” and so they decided to follow the star… Because they paid attention to this light, they came to Bethlehem and met Jesus.

The reading from Isaiah also points us toward the Light.  It tells us that the glory of the Lord is a Light that will lift darkness from our world.  And it reinforces the lesson from the Magi – when it says “lift up your eyes and look around”.  The Magi looked around and set out on their journey, and Isaiah calls on all God’s followers to do the same.

Sounds simple, right?  But we don’t find it easy to do.  King Herod heard of the light, and instead of instantly following, he sought to blot out that light.  And as the story says, the Magi listened not just to Herod’s words, saw not  just the shadow of his soul, and went home by another way.  They were not going to follow the unseeing eye of the closed mind.

Mind the Light.

Light isn’t always the brightness of the sun or the glow of a lamp.  Sometimes, it’s the warmth of a heart.  It’s God’s Light we’re looking for and when we pay attention to that Light, we find illuminating moments. 

Minding the Light is about paying attention, in love, to the world around us, to our communities, our church, our families, and seeing there not only what is, but what can be, as we do our best to follow that Light.

Sometimes minding the Light is easy… but sometimes it takes real intentionality, real effort to see what is there, what might be there.  

Quaker author Brent Bill tells the story of a favorite necktie he often wears at conferences on “paying attention”.  He asks people to tell him what they see on his tie… and it turns out that when you first look at it, what you see is a solid color tie with little dashes of color. Cute, maybe even Christmas-y, but nothing special.  Then he invites people to come up and check the tie out, close-up, because it’s part of his presentation.  

“Then people look up. Even from across the room, they try to see the tie and figure out what I mean. What they see is a maroon tie with bits of gold, brown, and blue on it. After the presentation, folks will come up to me. Some slyly try to make conversation while checking out the tie. Others just grab it, lift it close to their face, and begin scrutinizing it. “Ah, dogs,” they’ll say and smile. Yes, the tie is filled with all sorts of whimsical dogs.  

“That’s not all,” I reply. 

Many of them frown, sure they’ve paid close attention. They squinch their eyes and look some more. Then, usually a small chuckle: “Fire hydrant.” Yes, toward the bottom of the tie, in midst of all these doggies, is a tiny pink fire hydrant, placed there by the Savannah College of Art & Design alumna Robbi Behr. 

Behr, a textile artist and illustrator, has a full line of these quirky ties—full of cheese and one little happy mouse; toilets and one with the seat up; frogs with one catching a fly. They each require that observers pay attention. It’s not a paying attention to something that obviously needs paying attention to, such as when you see an M.C. Escher print. Rather, it’s that a necktie with dogs is sort of ordinary—so ordinary that we often don’t truly see it.”^[1]

Minding the Light is about paying attention, with love, to the Light around us, active and growing our world.

Here’s another thing for us to learn today:  there are a lot of false lights in our world. And even though we might not realize it, we can be led astray.  

In this coming year, for instance, our church will be making a lot of really important decisions.  And where we go with those decisions is going to depend on what kind of light we see, whether or not we’re looking with intentionality, and maybe even whether or not we’re tired or discouraged or upset.

Light looks different when you expect good things to happen.  It’s harder to see when the world is turning bad.  If you’re already discouraged about your life, a healthy light, one that leads into a strong future, can be so hard to handle that you turn away from it.

One of the reasons we congregationalists make important decisions as a group is that the group is less likely to be led astray by momentary discouragements than any single person,  But that doesn’t mean that a single person can’t have an effect on the group. 

Years ago, a church I was serving was choosing a new carpet for the fellowship hall.  We had narrowed things down to two choices – grey with red flecks or red with grey flecks – and agreed to make the decision after church one Sunday.  The time came, and most everyone wanted grey with red, but then one person, the president of the Women’s Fellowship, made a passionate plea for the red with grey.  No one had realized she cared that much for the color, but . . .   She changed everyone’s mind on the color that day.

And sometimes that one person is too influential.

By the following Sunday, we’d all learned that her husband had discovered her talking to her boyfriend on the church phone just before we made our decision.  That’s why she was so wound up.  We gathered after church, talked it over, and re-did the vote.  This time, the grey carpet won out.

We discovered that day that people who are upset about one thing can work out their feelings in other places… and that’s not always a good thing.  Their anger, their feelings, can lead them, and us, in wrong directions.

In the greater scheme of things, the color of the carpet wasn’t all that important – and it’s long-since been replaced by easy to clean tile – but the principle is still true.  Where we are psychologically can influence what we see, hear, and do.

This will be an important year for us, and what we will see, how we will follow God’s light, will be deeply influenced by our hopes and expectations.  We will need to be aware of all the pressures on us, pressures which might make us mis-read the Light.

I know that all of us are concerned about our future.  We’re smaller than we used to be.  Our money isn’t as abundant.  People do not come to church the way they did fifty, or even twenty, years ago.  The future, for us, is not signed, sealed and delivered the way our parents could assume.

All of that is true, But they are not all that we have before us.  For to pay attention only to those challenges and yet ignore every good sign we have, would be to let the gloom take over the light.  We would not be minding the Light.  

Yes, we face challenges.  Where is the light to be found in these circumstances?  What do we have to hold onto, what gives us hope, in these challenging days?  

We have love.  We have people who continue to care for one another, who care for our community outside our doors.  

We have people.  We have some of the best leaders here that it’s ever been my privilege to work with.  Your leaders know what they’re doing; they’ve paid attention to the world beyond our doors; they’re devoted to discerning our future, minding the Light still to come for us.

We have vision.  Together, we see a way forward.  

Our leaders have opened us up to service to our community in new ways, ways that better fit our strengths and abilities.  

Our church has begun to reach out to improve our offerings for children.  

We’re working to improve getting the word out about what we’re doing to the community around us.  

Later this month, we’re holding the first Parking Lot feedback session, and out of that, we expect to make plans for our Parking Lot management this summer.  

Our Search Committee has prepared, and now shared, a Profile of our church, a task which called forth extended looking for the Light in our world.  

We’re now expecting to see applications from interested candidates.  The Committee has built a strong relationship with the folks at the denomination to make sure that the candidates who apply are qualified, prepared, and ready to work with us.  

Yes, in the year to come, we will face challenges.  I invite you all, us, together, to seek God’s Light together.  And together we aim to Mind the Light which guides this church, bringing us every closer to God.

Amen.

© 2026, Virginia H. Child

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^[1] Excerpt From Mind The Light-Kindle-Final (1) J. Brent Bill  This material may be protected by copyright.