Category: Interim Ministry

A sermon preached at First Church UCC, Middletown CT on August 21, 2022

Jeremiah 1:4-10

Now the word of the Lord came to me saying, 
 “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, 
and before you were born I consecrated you; 
I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” 
Then I said, “Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” 
But the Lord said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am only a boy’; 
for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you. 
Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord.” 
Then the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the Lord said to me, 
“Now I have put my words in your mouth. 
See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms,
to pluck up and to pull down,
to destroy and to overthrow, 
to build and to plant.” 

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 last few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about truth, about what it is, and how to deal with it.

Now, you might expect that it’s all the stuff in the national news that is making me thing about the nature of truth, and I suppose that’s part of it… seeing how little some people think of truth.

But much of that isn’t really about truth, it’s about facts.  Did President Biden win the election?  Yes, that’s a fact.   Facts are demonstrable, provable, verifiable.  Truth, well, that’s something else altogether.

It seemed to me that today’s reading from Jeremiah is one of those Bible selections that can be read either as about facts or about truths.  I first thought about this in seminary.  You’ll remember that I’ve said I was raised in a Christian denomination considerably more liberal than the UCC, and it never occurred to any of my teachers that the Bible contained anything other than truth.  The idea that it might also contain facts was astonishing to us.  I’m not sure my teachers believed that Jesus was a real person, and I know no one believed that the miracles of Jesus were based in fact.

So, when I was studying Jeremiah at Andover Newton, with one of the world’s experts on Jeremiah, I was doubly astonished to discover there were people who believed that because the words said “before I formed you in the womb” that it was a polemic against abortion, or because the words said, “I am only a boy” that it literally meant Jeremiah was a little kid, maybe an eight-year old?

Doubly astonished because not only was that so unlikely to be factually true, but because for me, those interpretations or explanations meant that you missed the real point of the story.  

So, here’s what I think the story is about at this point.  God is calling Jeremiah to speak truth to the people of Judah in very troubled times.  Think of it this way…. Jeremiah has a job as dangerous as Liz Cheney’s, trying to speak truth to people who not only don’t want to hear, but don’t want him to have the opportunity to speak.  Speaking, in his time, and in his place, was dangerous.  But God was calling him, and so he tried to avoid the truth of the call by saying he wasn’t an adequate choice.  He was trying to fool God into letting him go.  

At the same time, and this is the truth I saw this week, Jeremiah really believes he’s not equipped for the job.  He can’t see the truth of his own abilities, and so he’s ducking, or trying to duck, the call to exercise what he doesn’t really believe exists.  He sees the danger, knows what’s likely to happen, and doesn’t feel up to it.

Who can blame him?  Who here has not, from time to time, found themselves denying a truth because it was too challenging, too frightening?  Friday night I was reading an article about leadership: the author was describing being sent to a basic school, where for the first six weeks, because of his prior experience, he thought he could skate.  One day, he wrote, I realized that the newbies, the students who’d never studied this before, were learning more than me, because they knew how little they knew.  And I thought I knew everything that was important.  His attitude changed that day, and recognizing the truth of his ignorance, he began to get so much more out of the training.  He saw his truth and it re-ordered his life.

Seeing the truth, not allowing facts to mislead, is one of the great skills of the Christian life.  It’s not easy to move from assuming that facts are truth, to understanding that facts are only part of truth, that facts always exist within a specific context, and that context is part and parcel of the meaning of those facts.  

This past week there was a story in the NY Times about a home appraisal in Maryland.  The owners wanted to appraise their home so they could get a loan and they expected, after having put tons of money into it, that the value would have risen considerably.  They’d paid $450,000 for the house, and done $40,000 of improvements, for a total of $490,000.  Homes in their neighborhood had gone up about 42%, so they expected a value closer to maybe $600,000.  But the appraiser said it was only worth $475,000.  In a neighborhood where values had gone up 42%, their home had lost value.

They tried again, made some changes in the interior – changed out photos – and arranged for friends to be there for the appraiser instead of being there themselves.  This time, with no other changes, their home appraised at $750,000.   

Yes, you heard me right.  The first appraiser said the home was worth $475,000.  The second appraiser said it was $750,000.

What was the truth here?  The truth seems to be that the first appraiser met the owners, who are Black.  The second appraiser met the owner’s friends, who are white.  And being white made the house worth almost $300,000 more.

Tell the truth and shame the devil.

It’s truth we need to get behind why the facts are what they are.  Yesterday, I read an article which discussed whether or not going to college is worthwhile – their primary evaluation was whether or not you made more money after going to college than if you had never gone.  No one will be surprised to hear that there’s a wide variance in results.  The top 19 schools are all medical schools, for instance.  After that, there are law schools, and business schools like Babson and Bentley.  The only unexpected high-success school, for me, was Princeton Theological Seminary.  Apparently, Presbyterians pay a lot better than I ever imagined, and Princeton Seminary is a much more financially rewarding place to study than even Princeton University.  Who knew?  

There are almost 4000 schools on the list; things get really interesting when you head to the bottom of the list.  The very bottom is populated by beauty colleges and independent yeshivas, but just above those schools, and the for-profit technical schools, you begin to find schools like the Inter-American University in Puerto Rico, where a former dean of my seminary went, and colleges for the native American community, and then community colleges and historic Black colleges, HBCUs.  They’re all mixed together, and if you only looked at the facts, you’d think that Benedict College was not all that different from the McCann School of business or the Advanced Institute of Hair Design.  Benedict is a small, Black school, in South Carolina.  Many of the kids who go to Benedict come from families where no one has ever gone to college before.  Their prep is abysmal, their challenges daunting.  Once you know the facts of the school’s background, know just who they’re hoping to educate, you realize that the worth of the school cannot be measured by how much money their graduates make.

Truth provides nuance to facts.  Facts are flat, truth is multi-dimensional.  When Jeremiah dug in his feet and tried to argue that he was not qualified, God provided a different view, the view that’s not quantifiable, the idea that some of our options have more social value than others.

Facts can say that we don’t make a difference, but truth says there’s more to what we do in life than facts can ever reflect.  Facts say we are only worthwhile when we can contribute to the community in some quantifiable way… either by working outside the home, or caring for children…. something that might be best described as work.  

A friend who’s living at an over-55 community tells me that she has neighbors who are still canning their vegetables for the winter, even though they live alone and can eat all their meals in the dining room, because without that canning activity, they don’t think their lives have value.  Facts say, unless they’re producing, they don’t matter; truth says that everyone matters, whether they can add to society or not.

Today’s lesson from Jeremiah calls us to a way of life which values truth more than fact, values people more than their usefulness, values love more than anything else.  Let us join Jeremiah in listening for God’s truth in our lives.

Amen.

© 2022, Virginia H. Child

A sermon preached at First Church UCC, Middletown CT on August 14, 2022

Scripture:     I Corinthians 12:12-26 (The Message): Your body has many parts—limbs, organs, cells—but no matter how many parts you can name, you’re still one body. It’s exactly the same with Christ. By means of his one Spirit, we all said good-bye to our partial and piecemeal lives. We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which he has the final say in everything. (This is what we proclaimed in word and action when we were baptized.) Each of us is now a part of his resurrection body, refreshed and sustained at one fountain—his Spirit—where we all come to drink. The old labels we once used to identify ourselves—labels like Jew or Greek, slave or free—are no longer useful. We need something larger, more comprehensive.

I want you to think about how all this makes you more significant, not less. A body isn’t just a single part blown up into something huge. It’s all the different-but-similar parts arranged and functioning together. If Foot said, “I’m not elegant like Hand, embellished with rings; I guess I don’t belong to this body,” would that make it so? If Ear said, “I’m not beautiful like Eye, limpid and expressive; I don’t deserve a place on the head,” would you want to remove it from the body? If the body was all eye, how could it hear? If all ear, how could it smell? As it is, we see that God has carefully placed each part of the body right where he wanted it.

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.

In Saturday’s New York Times, David Brooks offered an essay about the importance of friendships, and not just friendships, but friendships which cut across class lines… and I thought, “aha, those kinds of friendships that our children make in church, or at church camp!”

Because, you see, children who are part of friendship which cut across the social lines that divide us one from another – those children – do better in life than kids who don’t.  He writes:

One of the most powerful predictors of whether you rise out of poverty is how many of the people you know are well off.

The size of the effect is astounding. Cross-class friendships are a better predictor of upward mobility than school quality, job availability, community cohesion or family structure. If these results are true, then we have largely ignored a powerful way to help people realize the American dream.

Now the essay is focusing on upward mobility, but I don’t think the positive effects of cross-class friendships are limited to just making more money or living.  That’s because cross-class friendships are just one example of the reality we explore in baptism.

Baptism, you see, establishes the ultimate cross-class friendship.  Think again about what Paul describes in our lesson from 1 Corinthians:  Your body has many parts – limbs, organs, cells – but no matter how many parts you can name, you’re still one body.  We are all part of something, something that is incomplete without what we bring to the body.  

Today, right now, we are more complete now that Maeve is part of the body. 

There’s more to this – because, you see, baptism, in its proclamation of radical inclusivity, drives inclusivity in our wider world…. not overnight, but inevitably.  That’s because baptism is a foundational acknowledgement of humanity.

Look at it this way:  we only baptize human beings.  We don’t baptized dogs or cats or cows or sheep.  We baptize humans.  Therefore, anyone we baptize is human.  Baptism is an absolute affirmation of our humanity.

That means that when slaveholders insisted that their slaves must be baptized, they were acknowledging that slaves were human beings – not sub-human, not animals, but people, and people loved by God.  When we said Natives had to be baptized, we were acknowledging their humanity.  I don’t think every slave holder understood what they were doing, but that doesn’t change the truth of the offer.  

Baptism is Christianity’s response to the attacks on any of us who have been told that we are not fully human for whatever reason – women who’ve been told they are second class, trans folks, GLBTQ+ people, Black people, brown people, all POC, folks with intellectual challenges, immigrants, people who don’t dress right, eat right, talk right – it doesn’t matter to God, and it shouldn’t matter any of God’s people.  Because God has recognized that each any every human being matters.  

Once you acknowledge someone’s humanity, you can no longer legitimately deny them the right to live as they are, as who they are.  They are real, as they are; they do not need to change to be human.

This applies to everyone, to the whole world.  You don’t have to be baptized to be recognized as a human being.  It’s not about being baptized, it’s about our unconditional welcome to every human in the world.  It wasn’t baptism that made slaves human, it was God who made everyone human.  Baptism helps us see that truth, and pushes us to make it real in our lives.

Baptism destroys the idea that the church is a club for like-minded people.  And when we live up to our calling, we naturally create cross-class friendships.  When we create those cross-class, cross-race, cross all the dividing lines-relationships, we change ourselves and our world.

It’s not easy, but that’s what we’re here for, that’s why we baptize.  The struggle to change, to recognize the meaning of baptism, is the struggle of our world to grow closer to God’s intention for us, to be a place of peace, justice, love, acceptance, mercy.  

Every time we baptize someone, we stand up for the equality of all humanity.  And every time we seek to live into our baptism, we take part in that difficult, but foundational, struggle.  Maeve doesn’t yet know what’s out there for her, but her parents have promised to teach her, and we have promised to help them, not just here, but standing in for every congregation which takes baptism seriously.

Today we blessed Maeve and her family, and we thank them for reminding us of the power of baptism to make our world better.

Amen.

A sermon preached at First Church UCC, Middletown CT on August 7, 2022

Hebrews 11:1-3 — Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.

Luke 12:32-40 —  “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. 

 “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks. Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them. If he comes during the middle of the night, or near dawn, and finds them so, blessed are those slaves. 

 “But know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” 

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.

I want you to imagine your usual day – we get up, we eat, or not, we shower, we go to work, or get busy on a project, and the day progresses.  Maybe we go out to lunch with a friend, or the grandkids come over.  Evening comes, and we watch the baseball game, and then to bed.

And tomorrow will be more of the same.  Well, maybe we’ll go to the beach, or play golf, or spend hours in the library researching something exciting, but basically, it’s get up, eat, work, play, back to bed.  Over and over.  If we live to be eighty, we’ll do it 29,200 times.

Why?  Do we do this just because we’re alive, do it without thinking?  Or do we ever ask the more interesting question —  if we have 29,200 days at our disposal, what makes them worth living?

What makes our lives worth living?

When I was a kid, one of the joys of the library in West Chester PA was their extensive collection of science fiction.  It was there that I discovered the subtly subversive works of Robert Heinlein, and reveled in his picture of a world where real questions were raised and chewed over – what is honor?  how can we be honest? what do we owe our community, our family?  And in one of my favorites, his book Beyond This Horizon, Heinlein first raised this question for me –  “what makes life worth living?”

I suppose that, at some level, those books were my first theology texts, tho Heinlein is not the least bit theistic.  None the less, the question he raised – what makes life worth living – is one of the major questions of any religion.  

You won’t be surprised to know that there’s more than one answer.  In Beyond This Horizon, it’s the promise of reincarnation that makes the difference; the idea that life continues made life worth living for the protagonist —  although I seem to remember that the hero’s views begin to change when he marries and they have a child, so there’s that, as well.

Christians have another take on what makes life worth living.  We understand our world to have been created with great potential, but at some level, it is not yet finished, certainly not perfect.  What makes our lives worth living is that we have been giving the opportunity to participate in the further creation of a world which practices the Godly virtues of peace, justice, equity, and welcoming love.

Well, it’s easy and clear to say, but not so much when it comes to the doing.  

Look at our world today:  we’re surrounded by the unmistakable evidences of climate change.  It’s hot, it’s August, but it’s too hot, for too long; there’s not enough rain.  I don’t know about you, but these days those ideas about how the Sahara became a desert are making too much sense.

Look at our government, and other world governments.  We’re fortunate here in Middletown to have great local government, but we can’t pretend that all is well with the state of democracy in the US.  

Maybe you know someone, maybe you are someone, who’s worked hard all their lives, and seen it all go for nothing.

Sometimes, it’s just hard to believe there’s any way that life is worth living.  We build our lives, maybe, on being the very best at what we do, and then the day comes that we’re not, not the best, not anymore.  Or our lives have value because of the work we do, or because we’re parents, or spouses.  And all of those are worthwhile things, but they are ways of valuing our lives that are built on fragile assumptions.  They’re good foundations, but not quite reliable foundations.

Building a worthwhile life on God?  Now we’re building on a reliable foundation.  God loves us, and that’s something to rely on.  But more than that, God knows us.  Other foundations expect us to be the best at what we do – best teacher, best mom, best whatever… but God does not expect us to be the best person in the world.  God knows that we are shot through with imperfections – that we don’t always work as hard, that sometimes we’re selfish, or greedy.  Our imperfections, in God’s eyes, do not stop us, do not make us utter failures.  They help us sharpen our focus, give us goals going ahead – we can aim to get better, but we do not have to batter ourselves against the unachievable goal of perfection.

God knows us, God loves us, God gives us valuable work to do.

Sometimes it can feel as though what we do to make a living is not worth much.  Not everyone teaches at a first-class school, not everyone creates a life in a place as nice as Middletown.  When I lived in Rutland, Vermont, one of my friends worked in a local grocery, checking groceries.  You know, that’s not very exciting work.  It doesn’t really engage your mind (and less so now than then, what with the price scanning technology we now have).  But Dot thought that God had called her to be friendly, and had given her that job as a place to practice her friendliness.  She told me that she knew that some of her customers did not speak to anyone from one week to the next, so she made an effort to recognize people, to engage them in meaningful conversations, to remember them from week to week, to give their lives value.

That’s the valuable work God gives us to do…. To make lives livable, to give them value.

In our first reading, from the letter to the Hebrews, the author says that faith is the assurance of things hoped for…what is seen was made from things that are not visible.  The life we can see was made from things we cannot see.  Our faith is built on something we cannot see clearly and will not always recognize.  And our Gospel lesson reminds us that we have to be ready for action at any time.

We do not always see or know the ways in which we can change our world.  Sure, some jobs seem to make it obvious – folks in the medical field save lives, for instance, and teachers do too, when they open up the world of the mind to their students – but even there we will never see all the ways we influence others.  

And how often do we make someone’s day by saying “thank you” when they serve us our coffee?  Or teach our children?  How many kids have felt better about themselves just because we exist and welcome queer children?  They never walked in our door but they know we exist and they know we think it’s ok that they exist too.  

You don’t need to be US Senator Robert Stafford, a member of Grace UCC in Rutland, Vermont, and come up with Stafford Grants, to have a life worth living.  You don’t need to be Bill Russell, maybe the greatest basketball player of all time, or Nichelle Nichols of Star Trek fame… you don’t need to be an actor or play pro ball – you just need to be kind, honest, trustworthy, decent.. and if you are, you will change the world around you for the better.  This is something that each of us can do, every day of the rest of our lives.

So, let’s get going…. let’s change our world and make our lives worth living!

Amen. 

© 2022, Virginia H. Child

A sermon preached at First Church UCC, Middletown CT on June 26, 2022

Galatians 5:1, 13–25

For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.…

For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.

Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.

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

Last Saturday, we had the Annual Meeting of our Conference – I mentioned it last week.  The worship was so not like what we have here.  It was more like what we did when we weren’t meeting together – one person or group after another, each videoed in their living rooms.  There was music – I particularly remember the organ and steel pan duet, the rock band….and other great music, though not what we hear in this place.  While there were songs, we were not able to sing together.  

You could almost think that the differences between that worship and this worship weren’t the same thing.  We struggled with that ourselves when COVID required us to let go of in-person worship.  We wondered, we worried, what could we be doing, was this anything like real worship. 

But we were, in fact, worshipping, different music, different settings.  We were united, not by our appearance, not by our economic status, our gender or orientation, not even our age or singing ability – we were united by what makes us a church.

To be church, you need four things:

1. You need people.
2. You need people who love Jesus.
3. You need people who love one another.
4. You need people who will reach out into their community.

Now there’s more to say about churches, but this is the core, the essential.  You can’t have church of any type without these things:  you can’t be a Catholic without people; you can’t be a Baptist if you don’t love one another, you can’t be Presbyterian without service, you can’t be a Congregationalist, or a Methodist, or anything at all, without people, Jesus, love and service.

Of course, there are different kinds of churches; some, like ours, are governed by the people, some by the pastor, some by the local bishop, or even some faraway headquarters.  Some insist the pastor wear special clothing – pulpit robes, and all kinds of fancy duds.  Some would rather the pastor wear ordinary street clothes.  Some begin by gathering in a circle, some dance, some have processions. 

And we differ in the details of what we believe.  But when you get right down to it, we all agree on the basic – people, Jesus, love, service.

Now, think about this – turn it around.  If you are a group of people who don’t like each other, can you be church?  If you don’t care about Jesus?  If you don’t serve your community?

This is the time of the year when I often attend mandolin camp; I’m not a very good classical mandolinist, but I really enjoy getting together with this group of about 40 people who all love to play the mandolin.  The first year I went, I remember our teachers were talking about how they began to learn to play our instrument.  Over and over we heard a variation on “I tried another instrument, but here I felt welcome”.  We had love, we had people…. and in many ways, we sounded like a church.  But we had no Jesus, we had no service…

I think of this whenever I hear people say “I worship God when I sail, or hike, or play golf… “ and think to myself (because arguing the proposition seems unwelcome) but you don’t have people, you don’t have Jesus, you don’t have service… and you don’t really have church.

Church is when we get together, not just to love one another, not just to be friendly, but to welcome the stranger, to serve the needy.

Our lessons for today make this clear.  They don’t talk about the right way to organize a church, or the right songs to sing, the right robes to wear.  They talk about how we make our commitments real in the eyes of all.  And that’s what makes a church a church.

In Galatians, Paul tells us that we are free people.  He says, Jesus has freed us from the dead hand of habits and expectations.  He tells us that we need no longer be the thoughtless victims of meanness, cheesiness, nastiness, greed, self-indulgence and so on.  He tells us that we are now the commissioned, empowered practitioners of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. 

Paul says we are not only all these things; he says we KNOW that we are free, we know we can put shoddiness aside, we know we are made and freed to be good.  And he expects that if we can do it, we will do it.

But, God bless him, Paul sometimes was more than a little optimistic.  Our Gospel lesson adds to Paul’s story by telling us about a couple of disciples and how they got it wrong, and about several would-be followers, who didn’t quite get the urgency of the whole endeavor.

You see, the time to be church is not tomorrow, it is not when it’ll be more convenient. The Samaritans were all in on following Jesus, until they knew what he actually intended.  It was all ok to follow Jesus, so long as he didn’t try to upset what was really important, so long as he didn’t challenge what they’d always known was true.  

It was all ok to follow Jesus, so long as it didn’t mean giving up any of the little luxuries that made life worthwhile. 

It was all ok to follow Jesus, so long as we were given enough time to take care of other important things.

The time to be church, the time to follow Jesus, is right here, right now.  And it’s often a time that doesn’t see right in our eyes.  I might not feel ready to follow Jesus.  I might think it’s more important to have some time for myself; I might think my laundry needs to be done.  I might even not agree with what it seems Jesus is asking me to do.  It doesn’t matter, not one bit.  

What matters is that we are church.  

What matters is that we are people, people who follow Jesus, people who love one another, people who serve our world.

Amen.

© 2022, Virginia H. Child

A sermon preached at First Church UCC, Middletown CT on June 19, 2022

Galatians 3:23-29    Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise. 

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.

Yesterday, the Southern New England Conference, the name for all the UCC churches in CT, MA and RI, held its third Annual Meeting.  At the beginning, there was a long – more than five minute – statement of apology, acknowledgment for stealing southern New England from the indigenous people who were living here.  Land acknowledgement is a great idea, but what does it mean if it doesn’t lead to some sort of action?

Words… words about gun control, words about land acknowledgement, words…. And now these words, from Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow.  McMorrow is a practicing Christian, a Roman Catholic, and she wrote in a recent Commonweal Magazine article:  

Calling yourself a Christian, or putting it in your Twitter bio, is not the same as being one.  It’s performative, and it’s nonsense.  It’s not showing faith through works.  

Last week I pointed out that everything we do here is founded on our belief in Jesus Christ, however you define that belief.  It’s quintessentially in our DNA – we don’t want to confine anyone to a particular way of describing Jesus, but we do want you to follow Jesus.

Mallory McMorrow reminds us that following Jesus is not about saying “we follow Jesus”.  It’s about following Jesus.  It’s not about getting into fun discussions about whether or not Jesus is fully human and. . . and fully divine.  It’s not about saying racism is bad.   It’s not even about white people learning about Juneteenth.  It’s about doing, not saying we do.  It’s about living out our faith.

Today’s scripture reading is one with which we’re pretty familiar, because it contains …. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.  But there’s more to this selection that that wonderful declaration.

You see, that declaration is part of a longer discussion about what makes us Christian.  Back in the day of Galatians, the way you became an adherent of a religion,  was that you were born to it.  You were a Roman, you followed Roman gods – tho a wealthy important Roman might also follow the Greek gods because they were classy.  But Phoenicians followed Phoenician gods, Egyptians followed Egyptian gods, and Jews followed the Creator God we follow today.  By and large, you didn’t change gods, unless you were trying to cozen up to the powers-that-be…. Thus the Herods pretend they are kinda sorta Roman, so as to be more acceptable to the occupying powers.

The question of the day for Paul was – did you have to become a Jew in order to be a true follower of Jesus?  If you were a Greek or a Roman or from one of those countries on the south side of the Mediterranean – did you have to give up who you’d been in order to become a follower of Jesus?  This was not just a religious question.  If Romans didn’t honor the Roman gods, their loyalty to the Roman authorities became suspect.  Being a Christian in those days was something of a liability.

There in Galatia, there was an argument going on, one which basically said, if you’re not born one of us, you’re really ever not going to be one of us.  We still think this way — we all know communities where if you’re not born there, or if you didn’t graduate from the high school, you will never ever really be accepted.  Or one of those places where if you aren’t from the right class, or not related to the ruling family… well, then, the words will say “you’re welcome”, but actions will say, “not so much. . .”

Our lesson helps us understand that everyone is welcome, that everyone is a member of the family, that everyone counts, that what supports one, supports all, what hurts one, hurts all.  And there’s more.

Because what we say is not just about words, it’s also about deeds.  And the Bible is really clear as to what those deeds will look like.  How we are to behave is throughout the Scriptures:  in Exodus 22, for instance, we read that aliens, people who are not of our country, must be treated as we treat ourselves.  In fact, all the laws and rules we find in Exodus and Leviticus, as boring and petty-fogging as they can seem, are an attempt to make sure that everyone is treated fairly.

Paul says it very clearly in Philippians 4: 7 Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.  In the Letter of James, it’s written:  be ders of the word, and not merely hearers…. And a little later in that same first chapter, it’s written:  ¹⁴ What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? ¹⁵ If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, ¹⁶ and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? ¹⁷ So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

Words are good.  We need to know who we are, whose we are.  

Deeds matter because they give tangible form to our words, they make our words live.   

Words and deeds together, are a gift from God, a gift to God.  

We welcome the stranger; we feed the hungry. We clothe the naked.  But we don’t just do exactly and only what those words say.  Feeding and clothing are only examples. We use our powers of observation and compassion to see what needs to happen where we are.  We use our intelligence to listen to our world, to let go of what’s no longer needed, to pick up what’s important now.  

We are Christians and we care about our world.  We are Christians and we work to make this world better.

That is our name, that is our calling, that is our work.

Amen.

© 2022, Virginia H. Child

A sermon preached at First Church UCC, Middletown CT on June 12, 2022

Acts 16:11-22

We (Paul and his companions) set sail from Troas and took a straight course to Samothrace, the following day to Neapolis, and from there to Philippi, which is a leading city of the district of Macedonia and a Roman colony. We remained in this city for some days. On the sabbath day we went outside the gate by the river, where we supposed there was a place of prayer; and we sat down and spoke to the women who had gathered there. A certain woman named Lydia, a worshiper of God, was listening to us; she was from the city of Thyatira and a dealer in purple cloth. The Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul. When she and her household were baptized, she urged us, saying, “If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home.” And she prevailed upon us. 

One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave-girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling. While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.” And it came out that very hour. 

But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities. When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, “These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.” The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods.

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.

Paul and his companions made the big journey over the sea to Philippi, to a city, a Roman colony, a crossroads between Europe and Asia – and a place where no one yet had heard their good news, where they had no friends that they knew of, where they had no connections.

One of the first things they did was hunt up other Jewish believers.  While they knew they would reach out to non-Jews, they wanted to begin where they might find friends, or friends of friends, where they might find connections.

And find them they did.  When they sat down with the women and began to tell their story, they met Lydia, a merchant in the city.  There they forged new connections and a new church.  

Those connections were not limited to those with money and power.  Others heard their gospel news and began to follow them.  One of those was one of the least in the city, a slave, a slave girl, a slave girl with not even a name.  But God’s story doesn’t come only to those with money; it comes to all of us.  The slave girl heard the story and began to tell all the world what she’d heard.  It was Jesus who brought together Lydia, Paul and the slave girl. 

What binds us together?

Is it our mutual love of UNO? Or pizza?

Is it that we went to the same school, maybe at the same time?

Have we known each other since forever?  Do we go to the same church? Were we on a committee together sometimes, some place?

Are we Facebook friends?

Were we/are we members of the same Scout troop? Or Rowing club?

Do we run together?  Work together?

Have we been poll watchers together for years?

Or do we love jazz, or organ music, or .. well, you fill in the blank…..

What ties us together?  What ties the “us” that is here today?  Not the “us” that’s family, or the “us” that loves some sport activity, or any other “us” you can think of.

What ties together the “us” that is here today?  What connects us to one another.

The foundation of all we do, the thing which draws us and hold us, loves us and pushes us is Jesus Christ.

Now we might say no, we’re here for the music, or the people or the church’s passion for justice, and all that’s real and true.  But it doesn’t exist on its own.  It exists because, first, we decided to follow Jesus.  All those things are good, and valuable, and important.  But they are not the foundation out of which all our connections grow.

We have many connection with one another and each of them, in some way, is founded on this man who lived two thousand years ago.  Now as it happens, there are many ways to describe that man.  Some of us believe Jesus was both God and man, some of us think he was a good person. 

But all of us believe that there is something about what he said, how he lived, that gives meaning and purpose to our world today.  All of us know that there’s something gravely wrong with our world.  We know that there are forces and powers trying to drive us back into the dark ages of hatred and contempt. And we know, however we describe Jesus, that he has a way forward, a way which unites us.

It’s on that connection that we build all the other connections which hold us together.  We are old and young and in-between; wealthy and struggling; educated and haven’t read a book in decades.  Some of us run, some hike, and some of us sit on the couch and watch others.  We are not all the same by any stretch of the imagination, and the connection which cements all the other connections here is that connection to Jesus.  That connection builds connections of passion and interest – our commitments to being Open and Affirming, our concern and involvement in issues of racial justice and equity, our dedication to feeding the hungry.

Some of us are Lydia, some of us are nameless slave girls…  some of us could recite the theological intricacies of the Apostle’s Creed, while some of us aren’t sure they want to say – out loud – that they follow Jesus. 

As a church, however, Jesus is the rock on which we stand and it is in Jesus’ name that we make our connections.  

Amen.

© 2022, Virginia H. Child

On June 5, our visiting preacher was the Rev. Marilyn Kendrix. The recording of the service, which includes the beautiful season-ending music of our choirs, is posted here. All appropriate licensing is on file in the First Church office.

A sermon preached at First Church UCC, Middletown CT on May 29, 2022

On Tuesday, nineteen kids and two teachers were murdered.  Seventeen more people were injured.  That’s horrible; we’re all shocked.  But there’s more.

It turns out that the police in Uvalde were in the school, but waited 45 minutes to confront the gunman, while children called 911 and pled for help.  And help didn’t come.  Forty-five minutes, those kids phoned and hoped, waited and died.

There are no words to describe that.  I just can’t imagine how the families are coping with this news.

I don’t want to get into the arguments about why the police made the choice they did, or whether or not it was proper for the Border Patrol to take over and rescue the children.  There’s another place for us to go today.

We hear all this with the echo of Sandy Hook in our backgrounds.  I expect that some of us know someone who had a child die there, or we know people who know people… Connecticut’s a small state.  Sandy Hook was a Connecticut tragedy; we know how folks in Uvalde, Texas feel today because we’ve been there.  This tragedy, this week, coming so close on what happened last week in Buffalo, brings back that awful question – where is God when things like this happen?  What does our faith have to say in the presence of evil?

You know, we’d all like to think that God has a finger on the pulse of every living person, that nothing happens outside the will of God.  I sure wish that were so.  My favorite question from the Heidelberg Catechism says:  

What is your only comfort in life and in death?

That I am not my own,
but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—
to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.
He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood,
and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.
He also watches over me in such a way
that not a hair can fall from my head
without the will of my Father in heaven. . .

That Catechism was a major point of formation for all of Reformed Protestant Christianity.  It’s still used today, more than 450 years after it was first written.  But it is not Scripture, and it is not right in every particularity.  Yes, I belong to my Savior.  But neither God nor Jesus watches over me to protect me from every harm.  

Theology can be something like trying to untangle a knot of yarn; if you loosen it here, it can tighten up over there, far away from where you started.  Here’s the thing:  if you believe that God watches over you and protects you, then what does it mean when bad things happen?  Does it mean that, oops, God’s attention wandered?  Does it mean… that God wanted this bad thing to happen to you?

There are Christians who have followed that idea down a rabbit hole, leading them to teach that bad things are God’s intentional acts, that those things are like a refiner’s fire, making us more and more fit for Heaven. You can even read the Book of Job, in the Bible, and find an entire argument about that way of understanding why bad things happen.

I’ve never been able to assent to that way of understanding evil.  I don’t think God sends bad things, or even allows bad things, so that we can deepen our faith.  In fact, I don’t want anything to do with that kind of God.  Life has sent me all the bad things I can handle, and more; I don’t need more from God!

So, where do I think that God is in the worst kinds of tragedies?  I think God is right there with us when bad things happen.  God is sitting next us in the emergency room, maybe handing us a bad cup of coffee – but it’s warm and feels good somehow.  It’s God who brings meals to my house when I can’t cook.  It’s God who gives me the courage to step into the funeral home when that’s what needs to be done.

Here’s where I got this idea of God:  there’s a lot of places to find it, but for me the key one is Romans 8, starting at verse 31:

If God is for us, who is against us?  He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? 

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Nothing can separate us from God’s love.

Romans tells us that nothing can separate us from God’s love.  That means that God’s love is the most important thing.  I dunno, I think God has made us so that when bad things happen, we’re capable of learning from them, growing stronger.  But I also know that sometimes the bad things are so bad that when they happen, we break into pieces.  I went to high school in south Florida; 1/3 of our school was Jewish.  None of my Jewish classmates had grandparents; they had all died back in Europe during World War II.  Sometimes things are so bad that they break us.  But even when we are broken, even when we can no longer believe in God, God is still there, still loving.

When his own son died, tragically, driving drunk, taking the curve too fast and sliding into the winter-frigid water in a small city north of Boston, William Sloane Coffin, then pastor of the Riverside Church in NYC, preached two weeks later and said:

When parents die, as my mother did last month, they take with them a large portion of the past. But when children die, they take away the future as well. That is what makes the valley of the shadow of death seem so incredibly dark and unending. In a prideful way it would be easier to walk the valley alone, nobly, head high, instead of — as we must — marching as the latest recruit in the world’s army of the bereaved.

We know he’s right, we feel it in our aching hearts.  When children die, they take away the future. . . 

Coffin rails against those folks who come up to us in our time of grief, press our hands and say, consolingly, “it was all God’s will”.  When my sister died, a couple of days after her birth, someone told me that “she was too good to live and so she’s gone to live with God”  That’s not a helpful thing to say to a three year old.  It made me profoundly angry with a God who would snatch my sister away before she had a chance to enjoy life.  

We are not three.  We know to fight back from hurtful or damaging ideas.  We know, as William Sloane Coffin wrote, My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break.

Why did those children die?  Because Texas has weak gun laws?  Because folks didn’t know how to stop the shooter before this came close to happening?  Because the police didn’t seem to know what to do with an active shooter in their school?  Sure, probably little bit of each of those, and more beside.  But they didn’t die because God wanted it that way, and they didn’t die just to teach us all a lesson.

This is Memorial Day weekend; it’s a time when we routinely honor those who have fought and died in our nation’s wars.  It’s a day when we, for once, recognize that wars inevitably take lives.  Out of each of the great wars our country has fought, have come great movements for peace, beginning with the establishment of Memorial Day itself.  Having seen the horrors of war, having paid the price with the life or health of a loved one, we work to try to make things better.  In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln wrote:

With malice toward none,  with charity for all,  
with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,  
let us strive on to finish the work we are in:  
to bind up the nation’s wounds, 
to care for him who shall have borne the battle 
and for his widow and his orphan 
— to do all which may achieve and cherish
a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Today, in the face of what we have seen in the last two weeks, we’re called to step up and challenge those who would make weapons available to all, without restriction or limit.  Today, let’s join the hundreds of thousands of people who are calling for better gun control.  The historian, Heather Cox Richardson, writes in her daily newsletter that today more people than ever are ready for gun control, background checks, and other boundaries around gun sales and possession.  We are not alone; let us not be discouraged, and continue to work to make our world safe for all God’s children.  Let us be the presence of God by our words and our actions, in the name of Jesus Christ.

Amen.

A sermon preached at First Church UCC, Middletown CT on May 22, 2022

Acts 16:9–15

During the night Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them.

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.

On Tuesday of this past week, President Biden went to Buffalo, New York.  

We know why he went.  

He went to Buffalo for the same reason President Obama went to Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston SC. 

He went to Buffalo because an impressionable kid who had spent way too much time listening to hate talk on television, decided it was his job to kill Black people.  

The kid planned his trip, chose to go to this city, this store, because he knew it to in an area with a lot of African-American people.  He made a recon trip to check out how the store was laid out, to maximize the number of people he would kill.  He identified two other areas in Buffalo – he’d intended to go to each of them and kill more people, more Black people.

That kid made plans, and when it was time drove three and a half hours from his home in Conklin NY to the big city of Buffalo, just to kill people.

We can blame the kid.  We could blame his parents.  We could criticize the law enforcement people who knew the kid had problems.  For that matter, we could blame the problems the kid had, but that’s not going to cut it, not anymore.  

When President Biden stood in Buffalo and said that white supremacy was a poison, he was right. And it’s white supremacy that I blame for the deaths of those people, for the deaths of immigrants, and Blacks, for the murder of Jews in Pittsburgh, for the deaths of people in a Taiwanese Presbyterian Church in California on Sunday afternoon.

The “replacement theory” this kid had been reading about, hearing on social media, and who knows what else, suggests that white people in our country are being “replaced” by people of color. That’s the theory behind hating immigrants.  That’s why keeping people of color out of the US is important. Killing people of color re-balances the races.  These people believe in “whites first, whites only” in much the same way George Wallace used to say “segregation now, segregation forever” – until he got really saved and changed his tune.

Folks who believe this poison think that the only people who should be here are 100% white, 100% Christian people – and by Christian, they don’t actually mean Christians.  They mean people who will use the name, but who don’t need to follow Jesus.  They mean people who aren’t anything else – not Jews, not Muslims, not Sikh, not anything else.  Christians by culture, but not by faith.  Those people are evil and the doctrines they teach are poison to our land.

This is why the lessons of Jesus are so essential.  Jesus teaches us, and the parts of Acts we’re reading in this season remind us, that there is no such thing as “replacement theory”.  We can’t be replaced, because we are all one family.  Everyone is welcome at God’s table; everyone is a member of God’s family.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that what we teach here is just something to fill in the time on Sunday mornings.  There isn’t a member of this church who doesn’t know how pleasant it would be to sit in peace and just read a Sunday paper, or go for a hike, or go fishing on a Sunday morning … and sometimes we do all those things.

But, most Sundays,  between 10 and 11 we gather here to remind ourselves that though we live in a world filled with poisonous ideas and hate-filled people, that is not the end of things.  It doesn’t have to be that way, and we are called to fight against it.  We come here to hear the story one more time, to refresh our energy, to be a community, to confront evil wherever it shows up, even if it’s in our own hearts.  

Today’s story is another of the many stories in Acts about breaking barriers.  This time, it’s the story of how Paul and his companions came to intentionally move from Asia to Europe.  If they’d never made that trip, we Europeans might still be without the knowledge of the way of Jesus.  

Let’s be clear; that wouldn’t have been better – the religious practices of the times before Jesus in northern Europe were sometimes very unpleasant, and could include, did include, human sacrifice.  So I, for one, am very happy that my ancestors heard about Jesus, heard because Paul travelled to Greece to tell the story.

In the latter part of this reading, a part we didn’t read today, we learn that one of the first converts Paul and his companions make in Europe is Lydia, a businesswoman; her example empowers women in a new way.  The trip from Turkey to Greece changed the world. 

It happened because Paul prayed.  It was prayer which changed his plans.  It was prayer that changed our world.

While I’m sure Paul prayed for guidance, I’m going to suggest today that the prayer which led to his journey didn’t begin with an impassioned call to God to give direction.  That’s one kind of prayer, but it’s not the only kind.  I believe Paul was also immersed in another kind of prayer, the kind of prayer which provides a framework for our lives.

Petitionary prayer, the kind of prayer we usually experience as joys and concerns, is always offered in response to a need expressed or a joy experienced.  It is one of the ways we speak to God.  

Formative prayer, however, is one of the ways God speaks with us.  

I think it was formative prayer that was the kind of prayer which prepared Paul to hear the call of God, to recognize the vision of the man in Macedonia, asking “come over and help us”. 

At its most basic, formative prayer is based on a commitment to listen to God’s word as chosen by some one or something other than ourselves.  It might be grounded in a commitment to say the Lord’s Prayer every morning, so that prayer might provide a pattern for the day.

It might be found in faithful reading of a magazine like The Upper Room, or the use of a prayer book, or the reading of devotional book.  The person who decides to read a chapter a day of the Bible is doing the same thing. 

There are thousands of “right ways” to tune into this kind of spiritual leadership.   It doesn’t have to be complicated.  Sometimes we read a chapter a day from a book.  There are devotional books of daily readings, some still in print after a hundred or more years.  There are daily prayer books, with full-blown prayer services for morning, noon and night.

The essence of this kind of prayer is that we follow someone else’s lead in choosing what to read, study or pray about.  It is not about what feels right to me, but the courage to listen to someone else, giving authority to someone outside our own lives.  

Paul founded his faith in that kind of daily, repetitive, openness to hearing God’s will for him.  It drew him out of the land of his birth, the land where his faith was known, into a new place.  His practice of listening for God’s voice opened him to God’s word, gave him vision, courage and strength.

EunYoung Choi, a current Yale Divinity School student , wrote in the most recent, on-line, issue of the magazine Reflections,   “I believe prayer is a force of resistance that raises hope by naming injustice and suffering.  Prayer is not a passive act that merely wishes for dramatic change and breakthrough, but is a stronghold that gathers hearts and instills wonder.”

In a world filled with the poison of  hatred, we need that kind of strength.  We need that kind of regular call to move beyond our own comfort levels, we need that constant reminder of who we are and what we’re called to.

The prayer which forms us is important.  It focuses us, helps strengthen our resolve, clarifies our purpose.  It is a central part of how we stand up to that evil we all see in this world.  It counteracts the hatred which is everywhere these days.  It is absolutely foundational.

Our world is filled with poison; let us in our prayers listen to God’s preparation to be people of peace.

Amen.

© 2022, Virginia H. Child

A sermon preached at First Church UCC, Middletown CT on May 15, 2022

Acts 11:1-18 Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God. So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, saying, “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?” Then Peter began to explain it to them, step by step, saying, “I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners; and it came close to me. As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. I also heard a voice saying to me, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’ But I replied, ‘By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’ 

But a second time the voice answered from heaven, ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’ This happened three times; then everything was pulled up again to heaven. At that very moment three men, sent to me from Caesarea, arrived at the house where we were. The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us. These six brothers also accompanied me, and we entered the man’s house. He told us how he had seen the angel standing in his house and saying, ‘Send to Joppa and bring Simon, who is called Peter; he will give you a message by which you and your entire household will be saved.’ 

And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning. And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” When they heard this, they were silenced. And they praised God, saying, “Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.”

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.

There are two kinds of people in the world:  the people who want something new and different every day, and the people who, like me, could cheerfully do things the same way for the rest of our lives.

Today’s Scripture is a story about those two kinds of people.  

There were the people – called the “circumcised believers” here – who want to hew as closely to the past as is humanly possible, and the people, Peter and his followers, who were stepping out into new ways.

Except, of course, that parallel isn’t strictly true.  Peter was no fan of change.  Neither were his followers.  What they were, were people who, when they absolutely had to, were open to change, willing to change.  And the other folks?  They simply didn’t believe that change was necessary, in this time, or this place.  

Let’s look at what was really happening in this story:  it’s early days, really early days in the development of the Christian way.  What we’re seeing in this story is the beginnings of the separation of Jesus’ followers from the Jewish faith, not yet an argument between Christians and Jews.  In those days, almost all those who followed Jesus were themselves Jews. They kept the Jewish customs and laws, but, just as some Jews were Sadducees or Pharisees, these Jews were followers of Christ, proto-Christians.

And then gentiles, people who were not Jews, began to follow Jesus.  So the early community began to get into a heavy discussion of just what these new folks would have to do, how they would have to live, in order to be authentic Christians.  This discussion goes on throughout out all of the book of Acts, and shows up in other New Testament books as well.  Did they have to formally convert to Judaism?  Did they have to keep kosher?  And the question here – could Jews and non-Jewish believers eat together?

These are real questions.  What do we have to do, believe, follow, in order to be authentic?  What makes us Christians?

But the focus today is on how we deal with new ideas and change….on how we work out answers.  As I said, this is hard stuff.  I hear it in just about every church I work with:  we’re all willing to do what’s needed, but, wait a minute, what do you mean we’re not going to do that one thing I really like?  Or that thing which I find so deeply meaningful? 

I don’t know about you, but I’m happy as all get out to offer new things for new people, so long as it doesn’t mean I have to give up something that I really love.  And it’s easy to adapt to new ways, new contexts, so long as I feel as though I still have control… right?  You know what I mean???

So when the disciples got all upset because Peter had dared to eat with gentiles, because it destroyed their picture of Peter as a great, trustworthy, guy… it reminds me of those folks who loved their pastor right up until they saw him marching with Martin Luther King…. Or who respected their pastor until the day the church stopped using hymnals, or went to demonstrations, or . . .   

In this case, the folks who felt as though control was slipping from their fingers began to criticize Peter.  Here’s the good news:  they talked with him about their concerns.  They didn’t stand out in the parking lot.  They didn’t meet at Brew Bakers.  They didn’t tell Peter’s wife they were upset.  They spoke to him.  That gave Peter the opportunity to share with them how his mind had been changed by the dream God sent him.  He saw that God was giving him a new way, and the confirmation was when the men from Caesarea showed up and asked for his help.  They were gentiles (you can read their full story in Acts 10)… the Roman centurion Cornelius and his household.  

When Peter told Cornelius about Jesus, Cornelius immediately was struck by the truth of the story and the Holy Spirit fell upon him.  I dare say Peter was astonished, but it served as sure confirmation that God wanted them to be welcoming to gentiles, as they were, without them having to first become Jews.  

As Peter told his story to his fellow believers, they too were convinced that God was telling them to leave behind the requirements they’d lived for so long, and to begin to look at new ways to understand what it meant to live as a follower of Jesus.

As we look into our future, we’re going to find things – large and small – that we need to discuss, decisions that will have to be made that will be difficult, changes that will require us, either temporarily or permanently, give up things that have been so very important to us in order to gain something essential to our witness.  Maybe some of those things will be easy to set aside – like the church which stopped requiring their deacons to wear morning coats when they served Communion.  Maybe the future will ask hard things of us.  Maybe my easy thing will be  your hard thing, or vice versa.  When those times come, remember this:  when we pay attention to what God is calling us to do, it’s easier to see the authentic, the faithful, way to proceed.

I don’t mean to say that when we look to God for guidance that the answer will always be clear or simple, because that’s just not so.  Looking to God, however, pulls us away from our own personal preferences, draws us out of “what I’ve always done” toward the redemptive conversation about how we follow Jesus.  It takes us from “I” to “we”.  Without God, we’re simply debating personal preferences.  With God, we’re basing our decisions on something beyond ourselves.

With God’s guidance, we will find ourselves echoing Peter, when he says, “who am I to hinder God?”

Amen.

© 2022, Virginia H. Child