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