Month: June 2026

June 28, 2026  Proper 8  First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield MA

⁴⁰ “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. ⁴¹ Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward, and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous, ⁴² and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.”  (The Message Bible)

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.

The single most important part of our Christian commitment is our focus on “welcome”.  Jesus said, “whoever welcomes you, welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.”  It is in the practice of welcoming that we recognize Jesus in the hearts of those around us.  

When I was in fourth grade, our family moved from New Jersey to Pennsylvania.  It was not a pleasant experience.  There was a sense at my new school that I was an annoyance because they didn’t have many tranfers – they weren’t used to what that meant.

Five years later, we move to south Florida, to a school where almost every classmate had moved there from somewhere else.  There was only one kid in my ninth grade who had been born in Florida.  They were a lot better at welcoming newbies, and when we moved again two years later, we even moved to a school that had yet to graduate anyone (I became a member of the first graduating class).. the building wasn’t finished when we moved in.  The good folks of McArthur High School had lots of practice in welcoming and they were really good at it.  And it brought all the students together.

Welcoming is not always easy.  I’ve lived in places, and I bet you have as well, where you weren’t really welcome if you came from away, or if you hadn’t gone to the local high school.  And we all have heard the stories about the foolish people who dare to sit in the wrong pew, and are never going to be welcome.

That kind of welcome – the welcome of a new person to our fellowship is important, so important that it could be that coffee hour is just as important as Communion, and maybe even more important in our spiritual life…. But that kind of welcome, being welcome here in this room, with these people, is just one place, not the only place, where welcome matters.

Because, you see, as important as it is to welcome people here, this is really just practice for our ability to welcome out in the world.

Whoever gives even a cup of cold water to [someone in need] will receive the reward of knowing God.  

As I said, it’s not just about giving water to the thirsty, but about giving people what they need when they need it.  It’s about giving everyone in our community the education they need, for instance… not just providing an education to the children of the wealthy.  

That fourth grade classroom into which I moved, for instance, assigned seats for us on the basis of the importance of our fathers.  The more money your family had, the closer to the teacher you sat.  (I was not displeased… from the teacher’s point of view, the worst seats, the ones further from her, were also the ones closest to the windows…)  But there’s no doubt that the wealthy children got the largest portion of the teacher’s attention.  And to the extent that having her attention was good, useful, valuable… those of us who were poorer were really not welcome in the class.

Welcome is not just first choice of the coffee hour goodies.  It’s about giving everyone equal opportunity.

There’s no doubt, tho, that it’s not just my fourth grade school that sometimes struggles with welcome.  It can be hard to open things up to really welcome people who are new, different, maybe even odd…. It takes intentional effort to notice when our practices exclude others.  It takes even more effort when welcoming means spending money, raising taxes, installing a chair lift or hiring special ed teachers. 

Our world has a lot of incentive to close our eyes to the needs of the world… and if we don’t see it, it doesn’t really exist.  The church I served when we first began to talk about making the building handicapped accessible swore no one in town used a wheelchair.  After all, as Paul says, we tend to say, oh well, if we missed it, God will still forgive us.  And there’s a way that’s an accurate statement.  But the thing is, in the process of not paying attention to the needs of our world, not working intentionally to be welcoming, to see people as they are, to notice problems, we irreparably harm our own souls.  Every time we close our eyes, close our ears to pain, we build up calluses that make it more and more difficult to be caring.  Yes, God still loves us, but it’s harder and harder for us to know that love.  Being unwelcoming hardens our hearts.

God, however, has given us eyes to see, ears to hear, and minds to ask questions.  And God has given us the gift of welcome, so that we would use our gifts to pay attention, to make sure that everyone is included.  So let us take up the challenge and grow into God’s call to be a welcoming people.

Amen.

©2026, Virginia H. Child

June 21, 2026  Proper 7  First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield, MA

Romans 6:1-11 (The Message)  So what do we do? Keep on sinning so God can keep on forgiving? I should hope not! If we’ve left the country where sin is sovereign, how can we still live in our old house there? Or didn’t you realize we packed up and left there for good? That is what happened in baptism. When we went under the water, we left the old country of sin behind; when we came up out of the water, we entered into the new country of grace—a new life in a new land!

That’s what baptism into the life of Jesus means. When we are lowered into the water, it is like the burial of Jesus; when we are raised up out of the water, it is like the resurrection of Jesus. Each of us is raised into a light-filled world by our Father so that we can see where we’re going in our new grace-sovereign country.

Could it be any clearer? Our old way of life was nailed to the cross with Christ, a decisive end to that sin-miserable life—no longer at sin’s every beck and call! What we believe is this: If we get included in Christ’s sin-conquering death, we also get included in his life-saving resurrection. We know that when Jesus was raised from the dead it was a signal of the end of death-as-the-end. Never again will death have the last word. When Jesus died, he took sin down with him, but alive he brings God down to us. From now on, think of it this way: Sin speaks a dead language that means nothing to you; God speaks your mother tongue, and you hang on every word. You are dead to sin and alive to God. That’s what Jesus 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.

Friday was the new federal holiday, Juneteenth.  Like the fourth of July, it commemorates freedom.  Our ancestors liked to say we were slaves to England, but they were exaggerating for effect.  Juneteenth, on the other hand, is a holiday that celebrates the end of legal slavery in our country – real slavery, the kind where your children are born slaves and can be sold away from you, even when they’re toddlers.  

Juneteenth is also a nod to the greedy, grasping way that slaveholders held onto their slaves just as long as they could – in this case, by “forgetting” to tell them that slavery had been ended and they were free.  So, Juneteenth is celebrated on June 19, because that’s the day that Union soldiers arrived in Galveston TX and told the slaves there that they were free, that they had been free now for more than two years, according to the Emancipation Proclamation.  Now that the Civil War was over, their theoretical freedom had become real.  And so Black Americans celebrated.

We celebrate too but in a different way.  For us, Juneteenth is not about our gaining our freedom.  We celebrate by remembering the sin of those long-ago days, and paying attention to how the dregs of the sin of slavery still streak the realities of our lives today.

Back then, white people, maybe not our ancestors, but people our ancestors lived with, worked with, were related to, bought and sold human beings, separated parents from children, destroyed families.  When slavery was ended, white people, against maybe not our personal ancestors, set up a world that kept former slaves in economic bondage.  

Many of us remember the struggles for black people to vote; we remember watching Ruby Bridges walk to her school, past the lines of good, white, Christians, who shouted at her, threatened her, hated her, because this little first-grader was now attending their whites-only school.  I can remember the stories of the Pennsylvania elementary school I attended, where the black kids sat in the back of the room, and my astonishment when I realized that up until the year I transferred in, those black kids, all 8 grades of them, were taught in a basement classroom.  

Paul asked,  should we Keep on sinning so God can keep on forgiving? Of course not…. do we ignore the ways discrimination cripples our world because it feels so good when you realize how wrong it is?  And then he says, If we’ve left the country where sin is sovereign, how can we still live in our old house there? Or didn’t you realize we packed up and left there for good? That is what happened in baptism. When we went under the water, we left the old country of sin behind; when we came up out of the water, we entered into the new country of grace—a new life in a new land!

So, what he’s saying is this:  once you know something is wrong, something is sinful, and once you’ve made a public declaration that you want to be on God’s side, on the side of the good, you can’t turn back and pretend “you didn’t know”.  Once we know, once we realize == something as hidden in plain sight as all our black classmates sitting in one corner of the classroom == we can never pretend we don’t know, haven’t seen it anymore.

This is true of all kinds of sinful behavior.  Recognizing sin is life-changing.  Once you realize that your best friend’s spouse is abusing her (or him), you can’t pretend that everything’s all right.  Once you learn how copyright law works, you can never again freely post a movie or song without making sure you pay the creator.  Abuse is wrong; stealing someone’s creative work is wrong.  And knowing right from wrong changes us permanently.

This weekend, so near to Juneteenth, the message is this:  as the heirs of the costs of slavery, as those who have to live with the way it warped our world, we are called to turn away from all sin that grows out of the idea that white people are better, cleaner, smarter, safer.  We are called to dedicate ourselves to God’s community, where all are welcome, all are known, all are loved.  That’s why Juneteenth is important to us.  That’s how we Christians celebrate it.  

We turn away from sin because we’ve left that country where discrimination is just part of the scenery.  Now we live in the world of grace and welcome, colorful and loving, at home with God.

Amen.  

© 2026, Virginia H. Child

June 14, 2026  Proper 6  First Congregational UCC, Brimfield, MA

Romans 5:1-8 Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, ² through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. ³ And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, ⁴ and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, ⁵ and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. ⁶ For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. ⁷ Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. ⁸ But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.

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 many of us here have read at least the first of the Harry Potter stories?  Do you remember how the books began – with the story of a neglected little boy, forced to sleep in the closet under the stairs, hated and feared by his family?  

His aunt and uncle hated the scar on his forehead, hated the way his hair grew, hated. . .  hated his innate ability to do magic.  No matter where he was or what he did, he was never good enough, always treated with contempt.  It was a miserable life.

If  you’ve read enough of the stories, you know that Harry finds a new life, one where he’s known, respected, and loved – for the very things his family hated.  And you probably also noticed that his journey to love and acceptance wasn’t easy.  Being mistreated for the first dozen years of his life marked him in ways that made it hard for him to trust adults, sometimes made it hard for him to stay out of trouble, sometimes put his life in danger, sometimes put others’ lives in danger as well.

Now most of us weren’t raised in a closet under the stairs by people who hated and feared us.  But many of us still knew the kind of “I’m not welcome for who I am” rejection he knew.  

Maybe you couldn’t get all “A”s?  Or you couldn’t play sports for love nor money?  Maybe your hair was straight when it should have been curly, or curly when it should have been straight.  Maybe you just weren’t interested in the same things as everyone else.  Maybe a parent was an addict, or gone from the house.  Maybe you knew, even then, that you were gay/lesbian/trans/ and knew that could not be talked about…  

Maybe it was as basic as you thought you had to do everything correctly, and you never could.  You could never keep up with the list of right things, right behaviors….

Paul has a story for us, a story to counteract the poison of the idea that we have to be perfect to be acceptable, the story that we have to fit the common assumptions or expectations of our world, the story that there’s no such thing as good enough.

Paul says it’s trying that matters, because no one ever succeeds.  Paul says that it’s our trying that God loves, because trying to do good, trying to choose the right, is how we show our love for God to the world.  

Paul says that when we build our lives on being always good, always right, we build on quicksand – and when the sand gets saturated with the water of our failures, it collapses and so do we. But when we build our lives on the power of our efforts in overcoming our failures, we build strong lives, firm foundations.

When I was eighteen, I flunked out of the University of Florida.  I had gone to Florida as an AP student, recognized for my intelligence, with the high expectations of my parents.  Three semesters later, I was expelled for violation of academic probation, with a GPA of 1.0….  low enough that it would have been impossible for me to ever go back to Florida and re-build my academic career.  I turned my back on my failure; it was years before I tried again.  

It wasn’t until I came to a place where I knew that my failures didn’t matter as much as my willingness to try again that I came back to school.  It wasn’t until I met – at church – a college administrator who explained that I could be admitted, that I finally applied again.  And I graduated, having done the better part of three years’ work in two years, and graduated with highest honors.  I then went on to seminary, and did two masters’ degrees and a doctorate.  

If I had never learned that I was still acceptable, I would never have been able to do that.  

That’s Paul’s lesson for each of us today. He’s talking about our relationship with God, not our relationship with school, but the principle is the same.  

In our lesson for today, he says we are justified (that is, accepted) because of our faith, not because we’ve done such great things.  We don’t have to “earn” acceptance; it’s God’s free gift to each of us.  Once we know we are loved, know we are acceptable, we’re able to step beyond our faults, our failures, able to use them to help us grow into God’s love, able to help us become more and more loving, more and more able to build community.

Paul says not only that we are acceptable (or justified) by faith, but that instead of boasting about what has gone so well for us, we can boast about our failures, because it’s our failures which have lead to the real goals of life.  

So, failure teaches us endurance.  Endurance teaches us character.  Character gives us hope.  And hope helps us love, because in hope, God’s love is poured into our hearts.

Fools boast about what they’ve done well, not knowing, not caring, that you can never been good enough, can’t keep it up forever…but it’s the real thing when we realize that God came to love and accept us, to take whatever we are able to do and make it all good enough. 

Their god is the god of success, of perfection; our God is the God of love and acceptance.

Fool’s gold? Or Real Gold?  Fool’s god?  Our God?  Which way shall we go?

Amen.

© 2026, Virginia H. Child

June 7, 2026  Proper 5  First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield MA

Romans 4:1-5; 13-25

What then are we to say was gained by Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh? ² For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. ³ For what does the scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” ⁴ Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as something due. ⁵ But to one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness. ¹³ For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. ¹⁴ For if it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. ¹⁵ For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law, neither is there transgression. 

¹⁶ For this reason the promise depends on faith, in order that it may rest on grace, so that it may be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (who is the father of all of us, ¹⁷ as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”), in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.

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.

Early this past week I was browsing through Facebook when I came upon a post from a young man who’s running to be an Assemblyman in northeastern Connecticut.  It began this way:

Happy Straight Month! It’s American to be Anti-Pride Month, this is America’s 250th Anniversary!  

In unfortunate recent history, Pride Month recognition began with Bill Clinton in 1999!  

Take a stand like George Washington. In 1778, during the Revolutionary War, while serving as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, Washington approved the court-martial and dismissal of Lieutenant Frederick Gotthold Enslin. Enslin was charged with “attempting to commit sodomy.”

As your State Representative, I, Jadon MacCormack, would stand firmly against the Transgender and LGBT movement that has for too long corrupted our families, undermined parental authority, and eroded the foundational values of our society. This ideology promotes confusion over clarity, prioritizes feelings over biological reality, and seeks to redefine the natural order of marriage, family, and human identity in ways that directly contradict God-given rights and common sense.

I will fight relentlessly in the state legislature to protect our children from premature medical interventions, indoctrination in schools, and the normalization of perverse ideologies that threaten the innocence of the next generation.^[1]

Then I looked down, and the candidate’s mom had also re-posted a post he’d originally put up in 2025 – a picture of a noose, with the caption “The Bible has a better idea”. 

A man who believes that the Bible encourages the execution of gay people is running for election to the Connecticut Assembly.

I was shocked.  And I hope you are as well.  Don’t get lost in the little typos or errors of fact.  Pay attention to the hatred and fear instead.  See that this is being said, out in public, by someone running for elected office, just down the road and over the state line from us.

Reading it sure made it clear why we need times like June, Pride Month, to make it clear that God welcomes everyone.  It tells us there’s a reason why we need to have times like this to make it clear that LGBTQ people do not stand by themselves while this kind of vileness is thrown at them.  

When we became an Open and Affirming Church we pledged ourselves to stand with those who were hated for who they are.  

Today I want to talk about why we believe that God loves everyone, about that belief that underlies just about everything we do, so that when you meet hatred, especially hatred that says it’s the Christian way, you’ll be able to stand up for the Gospel.  And at the end, I’ll tell you what’s happening over in Connecticut, at least so far.

You know, we don’t just make this up out of whole cloth.   Everything we preach and believe has its foundation in the Bible.  We take the ideas of the Bible seriously, looking for the basic principles in stories, and studying how those principles can guide us in today’s problems and challenges.

We don’t take it literally, because if we did, we’d be locking ourselves into what the original authors talked about 2000 or more years ago, locking ourselves into their ideas about science, or history.  And the Bible was never written to be a cookbook or a history book or even a science text.  It was written to be a guidebook for life.

So, let’s begin with just a short quote from chapter 9 of Matthew’s gospel:  

⁹ As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax-collection station, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him. 

¹⁰ And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with Jesus and his disciples. ¹¹ When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” ¹² But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. ¹³ Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.”

The first thing to see is that this is the story of how Jesus called Matthew to be one of the disciples.  But it has more to tell us….  Matthew was a tax collector, and Jesus called him… but tax collectors were the scum of the earth.  Jesus sat down to eat with people no one trusted or liked, people who weren’t going to get the best seat at the restaurant.  So, it’s not just a simple story about how Matthew turned into St. Matthew; it’s a story about how even the people who are most feared, most despised are welcomed by God.  No matter who you are or where you are on your life’s journey, you are welcome at God’s table.  Jesus has made that clear.

Matthew’s story isn’t our only lesson for today.  So, let’s turn to the Letter to the Romans.   In the lesson we read today, Paul is explaining why it is that Abraham is important to everyone, gentile or Jew.  When you read it closely – or have a class in Romans, as I did last week – it begins to be clear that what he’s saying is that Abraham’s life is a picture of how God relates to human beings. 

God didn’t choose Abraham, Paul says, because Abraham was the best person on the block, (or in his world, had the most, best, sheep flocks).  Abraham was good, for sure, but not that good.  Remember, he not only has a wife, Sarah, but a maidservant named Hagar with whom he has a son, Ishmael…. And when Sarah is jealous of Hagar and Ishmael, Abraham threw them out.  Not the actions of a consistently good man, for sure.  And yet, God invites Abraham to follow God and Abraham says yes. 

Paul says, “now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift, but as something due, but to one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly….the promises that Abraham would inherit the world…” didn’t come through works, but through Abraham’s faith in following God.  Abraham didn’t earn God’s love with good deeds; he was givenGod’s love through grace.

It is not our ability to be consistently good people  — though we certainly work on that – but our willingness to try, our love of God, our intention to follow God’s way that makes us God’s beloved children.  

Now some might argue, sure they’re right, that Paul himself says – both in Romans and in 2 Corinthians – that having gay sex is wrong.  We’ll be showing a movie in the fall about this particular translation, but for today all we need to know is that whenever Paul gives a list of “bad behaviors” he’s not writing a report on bad behaviors, he’s describing things that people in his time thought were bad.  It’s not surprising that people 2000 and more years ago thought being gay was wrong; we thought being gay was wrong just a few years ago.  Heck, when I was a kid, teachers tried to talk my parents into making me right-handed, because being left-handed meant I was untrustworthy and awkward.  Science and psychology have made a lot of progress in the last hundred years.

Today we have better science, better psychology, and we understand that there’s nothing wrong with being left-handed, and there’s nothing wrong with being gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, queer, or any other way of describing how we relate to one another.  Today we know that what matters is love, is the quality of a relationship.  

We see that same love in God’s arms reached out to all of us, even that poor young man down in Connecticut who so fears gay people.  Paul gives us the theological reasons for why that’s true; being here in this congregation, a place where all are welcome, gives us the experience of God’s welcoming love.  And being fed at God’s table, with this tangible sign of everlasting welcome is the final proof.  

Over this past week, since that first vile post went up, the outrage has grown down in Connecticut.  The candidate has been repudiated by his Party, his views condemned by area legislators in his party (as well as the opposite party), and he is constantly being asked to step down.  Now, some members of his party, over in Eastford, are petitioning to add a new candidate to the election, so that there will have to be a primary.  Yes, he has some supporters, but not many.  Right now, it doesn’t look as though his campaign will succeed.  

Remember this always:  God loves us all, each and every one, as we are, where we are, every day all the time.  So  come to this table and know you are loved.

Amen.

© 2026, Virginia H. Child

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^[1] Jadon E. MacCormack. https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=122115089558951847&set=a.122104237298951847