Category: Interim Ministry

A sermon preached at First Church UCC, Middletown CT on February 20, 2022. All licensing is on file at the church office.

Scripture: Luke 6:27-38

 “But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.

“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again.  But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

“Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”

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 week, one of our folks was telling me how sometimes all the talk about doing this or standing up for that can feel overwhelming.  and we mused together about the challenge of saying enough while not saying too much….  It’s one of the conversations I’ve had over and over in my time here.  It’s an important conversation because following our way of life is supposed to be about balance, but all too often slips over to one side or another, falls out of balance.  

Maybe the urgency of fixing our world crowds out the time we need to sit in contemplation.  Maybe the pain of the world makes it imperative that we turn away to a place of peace.  Maybe so much change that church needs to be a place of constancy with no possibility of adaptation to changing times, maybe so much turmoil in our personal lives that we just yearn for one place where all is always well…. whatever’s going on, an over-emphasis on one part of the Christian path can distort church life, even as – to outside eyes – it looks as though we’re the best church ever, that we’re on the one right path…

One of the reasons I love today’s Gospel reading from Luke, is that it drives right down the center line of our faith live…. keeping the needed balance between our personal needs and the needs of the world.  It does that by centering the whole enterprise on love.  

In Luke, you don’t do good deeds because those deeds need to be done, but because they are manifestations of God’s love for you, and your love for the world.  Whether those deeds, those actions are about how you deal with others or about life within your household, love is the foundation upon which they are built…. love for the world, love for your family, love for yourself – all built on God’s love for all creation.

Some years ago, our national church put together a statement entitled “Toward the 21^st Century”.  It is another way of saying the same thing – life together is a matter of balance, all built on a foundation of love.  You’ll find the entire text in today’s bulletin, and it’s there because I believe it makes our purpose and way of life clear.  It provides something of a measuring stick for our life together.

We are, the statement says, a church attentive to the word. We are a faithful people.   We are a dedicated people. We are a worshipping people.   

We are a people who have cast our lot with Jesus Christ.  We have been baptized, dedicated to God’s service, and we found our lives on a time set apart to name our priorities and reaffirm our commitments.

We are a church inclusive of all people.  There are to be no barriers at our doors to keep out those who would follow Christ.  The statement says, we seek to be a fully inclusive community of faith, sharing bread and cup with all who see, in Christ, the way to our common future.  

We remember that there have been, still are, invisible barriers, and we work to remove them, that all who would follow this path are welcomed, and enlarge the covenanted community. 

We are a church responsive to God’s call.  God calls us to repair the world, to work for peace, to free the prisoners.  We are called to do this not only out in our world, but here in this place, that we might not just proclaim peace, but live it out in our life together.

We are a church supportive of one another.  We care about one another, even as we recognize that we are not perfect, not all identical, and – truth be told – sometimes annoying to each other.  This community is not built on our individual affinities, like a Harry Potter Fan Club.  In places like that you expect to find people with whom you have much in common.  But church is a community built on a common commitment to a way of life.  In this place, the illiterate and the erudite sit next to one another in mutuality and equality because in this place, in this fellowship what brings us together is our common desire to follow Jesus.  Nothing else matters.

Our is an Open and Affirming Church.  We proudly proclaim our belief that Black lives matter.  We believe that everyone deserves enough to eat.  And our commitments are not words only.  We welcome and include, we work and study.  We act to feed the hungry.

But those actions, in this fellowship, must be accompanied by an equal desire to reach out to one another in mutual support.  Just as we are called to be ONA, we are called to care about one another’s concerns and fears.  When one of us is ill, we hold them up in prayer.  When one of us suffers, we extend a hand of comfort and companionship.  

From the other direction, a church which is so totally focused on comfort and support that it has no space, no energy, no urgency to reach out to love their neighbors and work for justice, is a church which has become a comfortable club for people who have replaced Jesus with themselves.

We seek a balance, a sense that there’s more than just one facet to our faith.  Within that balance, of course, some of us specialize.  The folks who count our offering each week are just as important as those who serve on the front lines of our public work.  Those who create and maintain our prayer ministry complement the work of those who are teaching us about racial justice.  The person who comes in and makes sure the sound system is up and running is as important as anyone else here.

Some things, we all do.  We’re all pledged to be kind.  We’re all pledged to question the usual way.  We’re all pledged to care about one another.    We’re all pledged to gather regularly and praise God in worship.

…because we are a church that is attentive to the Word, inclusive of all God’s people, responsive to the needs of our world, and supportive of one another.

Amen.

© 2022, Virginia H.  Child

A sermon preached at First Church UCC, Middletown CT on February 13, 2022

Scripture Reading:  Luke 6:17–26

He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.

Then he looked up at his disciples and said:
“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
“Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.
“Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.
“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

“But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.
“Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.
“Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.
“Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”

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 words of today’s Gospel lesson turn the world upside down.

That’s why we want to block them, re-dress them in innocuous illustrations, make them sound like a sort of Hallmark sentiment, try to rinse all the radicality out of them that they might be no more than ignored background.

But power will out; change will happen, and our world will be turned upside down.  

First, a few words about the Beatitudes.  Yes, despite differences in the details,  — Luke describes this as a level place, Matthews says it takes place on a mountain – this portion from Luke is describing the same event as Matthew.  There’s a lot to be brought forward in thinking about why the two authors present the event differently, and why there are differences in the lists, but for right now, the important thing is – this lesson is central to who we are as Christians, and underlies everything we do. 

In the world outside the doors of this building, who you are, where you come from, how much money you make, how much power you have…. all those things matter.  If  you’re so stinking wealthy that, like Jeff Bezos of Amazon, you can try to get the Dutch government to tear down a historic bridge so your “huger than anyone’s” yacht can get out of the harbor where it was built…. well all that means you’re really really important.

But not in here.  

In here, importance is about Jesus.  We’re not working because we want to earn money, or even brownie points with God.  We’re working because God loves us.  We’re working because we love the vision of a world where the hungry are filled, where those who mourn find joy once again, where wrong is righted, where justice and mercy prevail.

Out in the world, CEOs get 40% pay raises, while workers struggle to pay their bills.

Out in the world, powerful people walk away from their crimes, unpunished, while those without power, particularly Black people without power, get stuck in an endless routine of jail, fines, joblessness… 

In this room, in our community, that world is turned upside down.

Some of us have money, lots of money.  Some of us have close to nothing.

Some of us have PhDs, some of us barely finished high school.

Here in this place, each one of us matters.  And we carry that belief out into our world.  It’s not just an equality that works in this space, but outside, we step back into our worldly roles. 

God has invited us, called us, to bring that radical equality out of this space and into our world. This is why we do what we do.  We feed the hungry because that’s how we hear God’s call.  We are kind to the folks running the cash registers at the grocery, because that’s part of God’s call.  We allow ourselves to feel the pain of those who have been left out, because that, too, is part of God’s call.

Some of this, let’s be clear, is pretty easy.  The whole world thinks the proper work of churches is stuff like feeding the hungry, or operating thrift shops, even maybe running tutoring programs… so long as it doesn’t bother people – by which they mean, clean, well-fed, well-off white people – when the poor, dirty, smelly, come around.  

But when we start talking about Jesus’ radical call to wake up to the ways we are called to dissolve invisible walls, and rise right through glass ceilings, well, things get more difficult.  The world thinks we live in a world with finite resources, finite opportunities.  If someone who has nothing gets something, it must come out of my pot, my pile.  

They’re wrong, but that’s what they believe.

We believe, because Jesus teaches  us, that there is enough for everyone.  Even more, Jesus teaches us that in building a world based on sharing, we will create abundance for all.  Whether it’s a Christmas Dinner or a Black Lives Matter event, this is the underlying truth.  When we work toward a world where we all have enough, we work to create a world where all have plenty.

Outside our doors, war threatens in the Ukraine.  Outside our doors, protests in Canada mean people are out of work in factories.  Outside our doors, it’s all me first, I’ve got mine.

But in our fellowship, we are following the path of Jesus; we are turning the world upside down.  

Amen.

© 2022, Virginia H. Child

A sermon preached at First Church UCC, Middletown CT on February 6, 2022

Luke 5:1–11 — Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” Simon answered, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.

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.

Life, the good life, is about balance.

And getting balanced, achieving balance, maintaining balance, is doable… but, like so many things in our world, it works better if we pay attention.  

Think about it….. how often do we do things in the same way that we always have, like Simon, fishing in one way, maybe always from the port side of the fishing vessel? and have never thought about letting down the nets on the other side, doing things from a different direction.

I don’t know about you, but changing things up to see things from the other side, or at least another direction, is not my default setting.  

My default is all about doing things in the same way, preferably at the same time….

My saving grace is that I’ve learned, over the years, that my default is a sure road to nowhere, that even my life needs both routine and out of the box in order to continue to be faithful to God’s call.  

It’s church life that taught me this.  I didn’t come up with it on my own.  It’s reading stories like today’s Gospel lesson and realizing that when Simon tried another way, he found abundant gifts – think of every one of those fish as a little wriggling opportunity – that he would have missed had he not followed the call to try something new, something different.

Church can be like that as well.  We, too, can fall into habits that keep us fishing from one side of the boat, which prevent us from see the gifts just waiting for us when we’re open to new ways, other ways, of being

At it’s best, church, like individual life, is a balance… the way our bulletin cover puts it – for churches – is that at its best church life is a never-ending circle of belief, compassion, and action.  No one of them is primary, no one of them is the single most important.  The three work together to create a balanced way of being.

In the UCC essay I included today, John Thomas, who was president of the UCC from 1999 to 2009, wrote of a visit he’d made to Emmaus Homes in Missouri.  Emmaus was founded by German immigrants, part of our denomination, who had learned that faith called forth compassion, and compassion led to action, and so they had created this beloved place for people with developmental disabilities and epilepsy to live in safety and comfort, surrounded by love.  He tells of the resident, who believed that a mural of the Emmaus story in Luke, where the disciples meet the risen Christ, was more importantly, a mural of the day Jesus visited her home.  John adds, “what our resident friend may not have grasped with her head she knew in her heart.”  

Jesus is where head and heart and hands come together.  Whether it’s the Emmaus of the Bible, or the Emmaus of St. Charles MO, Jesus is there where head, heart and hands work together in harmony.

Just as that’s true in our church life, it’s true for our personal lives as well.  We are made to use our minds, to think things through, to check out the long-term implications, to learn the background history, and even to understand the math behind the proposals.  But life is so much more than head can ever show us.

I kinda think of it as head stuff is just one dimension of our world.  And there’s so much more.  When it all plays out the way it’s supposed to, our head knowledge should help open our hearts, to call us to care about what we’re learning.  And, as much as I love academia, I’m not talking here about making us love the abstract, but to draw us inevitably to love the world to which our studies expose us.  In many ways, that’s just what we’re trying to do with racial justice – move from a head knowledge of the evils of racism to a heart which cries at the pain we now see at the base of Black life.   Our head knowledge breaks open our hearts.

The broken heart of compassion yearns to do… compassion, at its best, calls forth action.  I learn about a wrong, I feel the effects of the wrong, now what can I do.  Think of what we’ve done, year after year, through the Christmas meal that’s led by Julie.  Think of the volunteers, who come from all over, because they know what food insecurity is, and because they feel they have to do  something.

Sometimes we get stuck and keep doing the same thing over and over, even when its time has come.  I’ve known plenty of folks who, having lived through the Depression, could not stand to leave a roll on the table when they went out to eat.  They had plenty of money, and good food in their larder, but the experience of being hungry all the time had never left them.  My own mother told me she took up smoking to kill the pangs of hunger as she worked as a nurse, because she did not make enough money to afford adequate food.  When life was better, she was hooked on smoking, no longer hungry, but unable to stop.  She died at the age of 64 of emphysema.  Sometimes we hold on to things we do well beyond their use-by date.

And so we work our way around to our heads.  It’s a constant process, this learning to fish from the other side of the boat.  It’s not just move from this side to that one and now you can forget about it.  We need to always keep up with what’s going on around us, with how the world is changing.  So the interaction of head, heart and hands is circular, not linear.

Head, heart, hands – the building blocks of Christian community.  Knowing, loving, changing our world, one day at a time, that we might be a community steeped in love, immersed in mercy, and moving towards justice, today and always.

Amen.

© 2022, Virginia H. Child

A sermon preached at First Church UCC, Middletown CT on January 30, 2022

Gospel Reading:   Luke 4:21–30  

Then [Jesus] began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” He said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’ ” And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.

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 Sunday a pop singer, a member of a church which says being gay is unacceptable, posted a video talking about his struggle to keep his faith when he yearned for a relationship that would be for him of the same quality as his heterosexual friends.  He wants to be married, but his church tells him he cannot marry unless he marries heterosexually.

He’s not the only member of his church; he’s not the only member of any of the number of churches which believe that marriage is only between one man and one woman.  He’s fortunate in one sense: his family has been supportive and loving.  

And I bet that at least one person, if not a majority of the folks here this morning, want to send him a note and invite him to come worship with us next Sunday.

That’s not everyone’s reaction:  In the Facebook article about this person’s announcement, one reaction said:  Same sex marriage is wrong on so many levels. The bible says that it is better for someone like that to die then to be in that kind of relationship.  Any number of people responded in protest…but the original poster never changed his position.

The United Church of Christ, our congregation, believes that God welcomes everyone.  Sometimes it feels so right, so natural, that we forget that in much of the world, even here in Middletown, our stance is still revolutionary, still provokes the same reaction as Jesus experienced when he preached in his hometown synagogue, still results in folks being driven out.  

When our denomination voted to be Open and Affirming, when our church voted to be Open and Affirming, we were practicing a kind of hospitality which was costly, even dangerous.  When the UCC voted to accept gay marriage, we lost one entire Conference.  Conferences lost churches, local churches lost members.  And yet, we persisted and lives were changed, lives were saved.  

And there’s more.  Because the kind of outrageous, courageous, radical, world-changing welcome we began at that point, changed more than our welcome of LGBT+ people.  At some basic foundational level, it pushed the denomination as a whole, and our church in particular to re-think what it meant to be welcoming.

Before that conversation, before that discernment of God’s leading, we’d not thought much at all about how God welcomes people.  That’s because, I believe, we simply assumed that the way things were was the way things should be.  So, God called leaders of the church from among the white men, particularly the white men who wore suits, white shirts and ties.  Women led, of course, in the Women’s Fellowship, the Mission Committee action teams and in Christian Education.  But, almost without exception, the voice from the pulpit was one of those white men.  Sure, there were occasional Black leaders, particularly with Black churches.  And every once in a while, particularly in remote rural areas, women led congregations.  There might be the occasional closeted gay man leading a congregation…. but basically, we took our world as it was, as the way it should be.  And we thought that welcome meant that new folks would take us as their model, so that they’d look like us, dress like us, sing like we did, eat the same foods…

But it turned out that becoming an Open and Affirming denomination changed all that.   It looks to me as if you say, come as you are, people come as they are.  And if you say, “we welcome everyone,” and you live into it, well, then you’re going to welcome people who come as they are.  And it’s changed even what “us” means, changed us right down to the foundations.

Being Open and Affirming was no longer just about welcoming your uncle, son, sister, co-worker, about welcoming people who, other than being LGBT+, were just like us.  It grew and grew, resulting in changes no one imagined, because as we listened to God’s call to welcome LGBT+ people, we learned more about what welcome looks like… and it’s not a seat in the back by the door, wearing the costume of a straight white man…

The act of welcoming one, the experience of opening to concerns we’d never known existed, to lives, and cultures, and ways of being that we’d never imagined, well, that opened us to the ways our open doors were really closed, unless… you fit the picture.  And when we saw our reality, we began to understand that we’d only taken the first steps into a new and fuller reality, one that’s so much closer to God’s vision for our world.

What had always felt like threat – welcoming the other might make us lose something of ourselves – and thus had made us fearful and angry, has become a kind of wonder and awe, as we realize that welcoming the other makes us more truly ourselves.  We thought God wanted us to all be the same.  We’ve discovered that God wants us all to be ourselves.  No longer crammed into costumes that only fit a few, and them not as well as they thought. we are growing into a life in which we wear the way of life which works for us, the one God calls us to.  It’s focused on love, not on “one right ways”  

It’s as if we’re moving from being the folks who drive Jesus out the door to being the people who aim to live by the words of I Corinthians 13:  

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, 
I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 
And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, 
and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, 
but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, 
and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. 
It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 
it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 
It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. 
But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; 
as for tongues, they will cease; 
as for knowledge, it will come to an end. 
For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; 
but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.  
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, 
I thought like a child, 
I reasoned like a child; 
when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 
For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. 
Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. 
And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; 
and the greatest of these is love.

© 2022, Virginia H. Child

First Church, Middletown CT, January 23, 2022                          

Nehemiah 8: 1-3, 5-6, 8-10

. . all the people gathered together into the square before the Water Gate. They told the scribe Ezra to bring the book of the law of Moses, which the Lord had given to Israel. ² Accordingly, the priest Ezra brought the law before the assembly, both men and women and all who could hear with understanding. This was on the first day of the seventh month. He read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women and those who could understand; and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law.. . .  And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was standing above all the people; and when he opened it, all the people stood up. ⁶ Then Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people answered, “Amen, Amen,” lifting up their hands. Then they bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground. . . . So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.

The United Church “is a teller of the Christian Story. . . . We have to get it straight ourselves before we can get it out.”  Gabriel Fackre, Abbot Professor of Christian Theology,  Andover Newton Theological School

There never has been a greater piece of nonsense than the notion that it doesn’t make much difference what a person believes. Christianity, some people say, is a doing kind of religion, and particularly in a time like ours. 

With so many evils to be tackled and so much healing and reconciling to be done, spinning your wheels over a lot of theology is a waste of precious time. 

The truth, of course, is the other way around. It matters enormously what a person believes. It matters enormously what kind of understanding a congregation has of the Christian faith. Everything we do or leave undone depends ultimately on what we fundamentally believe about people and issues and what we believe the purposes of God have to do with them.  – Oliver Powell, an excerpt from “The United Church of Christ: A Beautiful, Heady, Exasperating Mix,” A.D. Magazine (September 1975): 39–48. 

I’ve been aware of the fact that in perceiving difference we tend to judge the differences.  I wonder what it takes to get to the point where the realization, under certain circumstances, is that we’re different and that both of us might be right and both of us might be wrong, maybe at the same time.   Reuben Sheares II

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.

Maybe you’ve seen it, too…. but I’m betting that even if some of you have, we haven’t all… so let me ask… have you seen the video of a man named Michael Junior and the singer?   So, let me tell you the story. . . 

Michael Junior is giving a presentation at a meeting in a huge auditorium.  As the video begins, he’s just called on a man and learned that this guy is a singer.  So, Michael Junior asks him, can you sing a phrase from Amazing Grace for us?

And the man does, and does it very well.

But then Michael Junior says to him, “can you do it again? But this time, sing as if your father’s just gone to jail, as if you’ve just been seriously injured.”  And the man sang again… but this time it’s not just a really good rendition; it’s heart-breakingly passionate, beautiful, powerful.

And Michael Junior turns to the audience and says, the first time the man sang, he knew “what” he was doing and he did pretty well.  But the second time he sang, he knew “why” he was singing, and that made all the difference.

Knowing our “why” matters.  It matters that we know why we do what we do, why we make the choices we do, why we live as we live. 

Many people do what we do, and they do those things for many reasons.  Their reasons are important and real, but they are not our reasons.  It can be good to do  because it’s the right things to do; it can be good to do because it’s just plain good business.  We can do good because that’s what we do.  But for us, those reasons are not our reasons.

What we do as a church, how we live as individual believers, how we understand our world, grows out of our beliefs that God has made this world, that we have been set here to create, sustain and share a world built on principles of love, justice, mercy and generosity.

Our faith drives our life together.  Our “why” matters.  

But – we in the UCC have a love/hate relationship with the idea of talking about what we believe and why we believe it.  As the ad on the bulletin cover says, “Dogma?  We Don’t Do Dogma”.  and that’s true.  Our church family believes in testimonies of faith, not tests of faith.  We tiptoe backwards away from any conversation that looks like it’s going to say, dogmatically, that this is the right way to be, or the right thing to believe.

So, talking about our why is hard for us.  

We don’t want to have tests of faith, for sure.  But we do want to understand that there’s something there, that it’s worth the conversation, and sometimes even the argument, to talk together about our beliefs.  Today’s lessons will help us see how and why this conversation can enrich our lives even when we will not end up with one right answer to everything.

Our Scripture lesson for today tells us a story of a return from exile…. just to set the context… there had been a war, and the leaders of the Jewish kingdom had been forced into exile; over time many of them became important officials in the Persian kingdom.  Maybe a hundred years later, their descendants began to realize that Jerusalem, their ancestral home, was in tough shape, and Nehemiah has been given the responsibility of going back to Jerusalem, rebuilding the walls, and re-establishing a strong and healthy community in the city.

When the Hebrew leaders came back from exile into Jerusalem, they found the city populated by folks who had been left behind.  The current inhabitants had stories about their faith, but the stories, much like telephone tag, had been mis-told, misunderstood, and not really followed… 

And so, as our lesson begins, Nehemiah has gathered all the people at the Water Gate.  Then he began to have the Torah read to the people.  Right up until this moment, they had not known why they were doing anything….  But as the Torah was read, and explained, there was great joy in their new understanding.    It was essential for the renewal of their community that they know and understand their ‘why’.

We often avoid talking about our “why” because we’re so afraid we’ll fight.  So many of us have come to the United Church from other churches because, in those places, all they did was fight about beliefs, or because it was set up that if you couldn’t say yes to every proposition, you were thrown out the door.  

One of my theology professors, Gabriel Fackre, used to say that while there was one Christian path, it was wide, more like those wagon train trails with lots of alternative paths than like a one-right-road interstate.  Gabe said what was important was that we were all headed in the same direction, not that we were all on one right path.  And so he thought it was absolutely essential that we engage in conversation about where we were going and “why” so that each of us would understand our relationship with others and how we were travelling together.

It matters what we believe.  It matters what our “why” is.

Howard’s been reminding us about the many places where the United Church is engaged in mission by inviting our prayers each week for folks serving in faraway places.  But you may not have realized that our missions are one place where our “why” makes an enormous difference.

Some religious groups understand mission to be the act of reaching out to non-adherents of their group and engaging in activities focused on converting those people to their beliefs, establishing new religious groups, and so on.  We used to do missions that way; that’s why we went to Hawaii – to bring Christianity, bring salvation to a people who we understood needed that blessing.

But over the years, our “why” began to change.  Maybe it was that Congregationalist minister, Charles Sheldon, who wrote In His Steps and invited us to ask, what would Jesus do?, but however it came, our “why” began to be, because Jesus wanted all people to live in safety, to have enough to eat, to be openly and freely who God made them to be.  

We talked about it; we argued, we shared ideas, and our “why” became clearer and clearer.  Today, we understand that we do what we do because we are called by God to help create the world God wanted…. a world of  justice and mercy, a world where it matters why they’re hungry or broke, or abused or hated.  Then what happens to them matters, too.  

And yes, we’ll argue about the details, because this stuff matters.  You drink Pepsi, I drink iced tea, unsweetened – why on earth would we bother to argue about it?  But when stuff really matters, when it comes to how we understand and use power, or why people do bad things – well, those are important questions.  and important questions need serious, heavy duty discussion, and sometimes arguments.  Reuben Sheares, who was a leader of the UCC when I was first ordained used to say that he thought disagreement was essential for us, and would lead us to the realization that we’re different folks and that we could both be right and both be wrong at one and the same time.  Conversation, discussion, argument, all led to deeper understanding.  You can read more of what Reuben wrote in the essay in today’s bulletin.

Our “why” matters.

It’s worth talking about.

We may get into arguments, because this is important.

We need to dare to do it, to talk about hard things.

Because our “why” matters.

Amen.

© 2022, Virginia H. Child

A sermon preached at First Church UCC, Middletown CT on January 16, 2022

When the United Church (of Christ) developed its Constitution and Bylaws on the “Basis of Union” principles it did in fact develop a principle of order new in the American scene of denominationally organized church life, based on principles of reformed ecclesiology.  The new element was a covenanted relationship of autonomous units of church life – a relationship delineated but not regulated by a Constitution and Bylaws.
Louis Gunnemann: The Shaping of the United Church of Christ, p. 15,

found in the essay, “The Quest for an Apt Metaphor” by Reuben Sheares II; undated

I Corinthians 12:   Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed. You know that when you were pagans, you were enticed and led astray to idols that could not speak. Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says “Let Jesus be cursed!” and no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit. 

I Corinthians 12:   Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed.  You know that when you were pagans, you were enticed and led astray to idols that could not speak. Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says “Let Jesus be cursed!” and no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit. 

Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.

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.

It was a few years ago, the day that John Dorhauer, who is president of the United Church of Christ, our denomination, came to the church I belong to.  He preached and then spent time with us afterwards.  I was sitting at one of the tables in our fellowship hall with a couple of friends.  They asked me, “who is this guy?  What do  you mean, he’s president of the church?” 

Like so many of us, they had joined our church from the Roman Catholic Church, and so I said, “well, he’s kinda like the Pope….”, except he has no power… and they were blown away by the idea that we all referred to him by his first name, and that he had no entourage, but was sitting at the next table, close enough to touch, with other ordinary members of the local church.

In the forty or years I’ve been in the UCC, I’ve never known a president of the denomination who wasn’t known to everyone by their first name.. Bob Moss, Joe Evans, Avery Post… right up through John Dorhauer.  The same is true of Conference Ministers… I’ve known quite a few, and with really rare exceptions, every single one of them was best known to his or her Conference by their first name.

You might think that doesn’t matter, or that it’s just a matter of personal preference.  But it’s more than that.  It is a living out of our belief  in the essential equality of all believers before God.  We don’t bow before the President of the Church; we sit down for a cup of coffee with Paul or Avery or John.  They are people like us, they are believers like us.

As it is with those prominent leaders of the denomination, so it is with us.  Steve is our Moderator, I am your pastor for the time being; we are met with respect, but we are not given that kind of public attention which accompanies Episcopal bishops or the elders of a conservative church.  Because we are all equals.  

We are all equals.  Look again at what Paul said in our Scripture for today: Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.

Everyone has a gift. Every gift is important.  Everyone is worthy of respect.  We each bring something to the table.  We need every one of those gifts.  The church which constructs itself so that it can only welcome some people, or only hear some ideas, is a church with a severe hearing problem.  It will be too narrowly focused, it’ll suffer from an inflexibility of heart. And before it dies, it’ll hurt many.

No law, no formal structure compels us to be church together; we have willingly agreed to work together, first of all with one another, then with the churches of the Middlesex Association, and then the Southern New England Conference and the United Church of Christ.  

We have willingly agreed t to share our gifts with one another.  When the United Church of Christ was formed, in 1957, our ancestors took that longstanding Protestant belief in the equality of believers and formed a denomination that refused to be organized by laws which mandate actions.  Instead we created a new way of being church, one which put relationships above rules.

This matters.  It matters because it is the foundation upon which God seeks to build a world of peace and justice.  We cannot live, cannot thrive without the joy of working together, as equals, in God’s world. 

This is a particular gift that we bring to our community.  As we live out our belief that everyone has a seat at the table here in our church, we model that everyone has a seat at the table, out in the world. 

This is important because everyone does not share our beliefs, even within the Christian family:  I don’t know that we always understand how radical we Congregationalists are in the way we are church, but here’s an example of a church which lived in a different world:

For the past few weeks, on my drives over here, I’ve been listening to a podcast entitled “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill”, a  megachurch in Seattle, Washington.  At one point, Mars Hill had an average weekly attendance of over 12,000 people, at several different locations in the greater Seattle area.  The folks who ran Mars Hill – their pastor, Mark Driscoll, and a board of elders – made all the decisions.  As the church grew and grew, the group of decision-makers shrank until it was basically just the pastor.  Without any constraints on his decisions – and with a basic belief that men were better than women, and pastors better than anyone else – Mark Driscoll grew into the role of a nasty, mean-spirited bully.  Driscoll was fired in 2014.  Organized in 1996, by 2015 the entire church was dissolved, though some members were re-organizing into smaller, more local congregations, none of which was associated with their former pastor.

Mars Hill did not believe that everyone had a seat at the table.  When you got right down to it, they didn’t even really believe that every member of a family had a seat at the table.  Men had seats.  Straight men.  Married men.  Married men with wives who didn’t work.  Married men with well-behaved children.  But not women.  Never women.  And don’t even mention the existence of non-binary, non-conforming, non-hetero people.  They weren’t even in the family, much less leading the congregation.   It took fifteen years for it to fall apart, and if you listen to the podcast, you’ll be horrified, as I was, at the pain their beliefs inflicted on so many people.  Their beliefs that some folks are better than others destroyed lives.

We believe that everyone has a seat at the table, that everyone has a voice in our life together, that everyone deserves respect, that no one is better than another.  We bring that gift to every place we live and work and play.

Our world needs our witness.  Let us share our gifts abundantly.

Amen.

© 2022, Virginia H. Child

A sermon preached at First Church UCC, Middletown CT on January 9, 2022

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” . . . .  Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God our Rock and our Redeemer.  Amen.

One of the most challenging things about world-changing events is that they are seldom obvious.  Sure, we can look back and see how some event or another changed our lives, but right then?  Not so much.

Maybe we’re so involved in the moment that there’s just no time or space to see how it will change things. . . it’s the first week of college.  You’ve got to move into your dorm room, there’s a roommate to negotiate with, courses to choose, maybe some homesickness to weather. . . but it’s only later, when you think about that elective you chose because you heard it was easy, and how it changed what you intended to study, and led you to be a chemist instead of a social worker. . . that you realize that first week of college changed your world.

So, here we are, at the day we remember the Baptism of Jesus, the day we look at choices… how they work, what difference they make.

Christmas is over.  Most of us have taken our trees down, vacuumed up the needles, packed away the decorations, recycled the trash, and begun to put everything back where it belongs. 

If Christmas is all about feasting and decorating, about giving and receiving presents, then yes, it’s over.  But if there’s more to it than that – and we think there is – then really, it’s only just begun.  Because Christmas is when we are first presented with the idea that God has come to be with us.  And this day, the Baptism of Jesus, is when we remember our own choice to follow that baby.  No matter which day we were baptized, this is the anniversary of that baptism.  

Jesus came to bring to all the world a whole new way of being.  The scholars say that’s why John starts his Gospel with the same words that begin the Bible – “in the beginning” and why he ends the story with Resurrection in a Garden, evoking the Garden of Eden.   Jesus took the Jewish understanding of the ethical life, and belief that each of us bears the image of God, and re-presents them in ways which speak powerfully to the pagan world beyond Palestine.  

In the world beyond the lands of the Jews, the Jewish ethic of the value of every life had not penetrated.  Unwanted babies were thrown away, left to die or to be raised as slaves.  There were no organized ways to reach out to the poor, to prevent starvation; the poor, the refugee didn’t matter, and their powerless status served as a sign that the gods did not smile on them.  The idea that God loved everyone, that everyone mattered, was revolutionary.

“In Jesus we receive a love letter written in human (form) from the God who created the vast cosmos in the beginning, continues to sustain the universe even now, and values each and every one of us more than we can possibly imagine.” (David Lose)

When we choose to be baptized, or choose to live in response to our baptism, we choose to work to bring this expansive and inclusive vision of God to all the world.

Because God’s son came to be a human being, being human must be, at its foundation, good.  And if human being are, at their inmost core, good, then they each and all are valuable in our world.

The last time I stopped in the Apple Store at Providence Place Mall, and in the course of making my purchase, I had a long conversation with the Apple guy…. Right now, he sells iPods and watches, computers and gizmos.  But, he told me, he started out working for a big computer company up near Framingham; in fact, the company paid him to get a degree from Providence College and to take computer science courses at University of Rhode Island – then, just before he graduated, they downsized, and his job was gone.  In an instant, he went from being a highly-regarded IT guy with a future, to a sales clerk at Radio Shack.  Now Radio Shack’s gone, and he’s selling computers for Apple.  

I don’t think this is what he thought he’d be doing, or who he’d be, at this point in his life.  It’s just hard to guarantee a future.

Jesus came as a human, born to a poor and insignificant family in the poorest part of the Roman Empire to help us see that it’s not power, or position that matters.  What gives us value, is that God loves each one of us as we are.  God’s love for us doesn’t if that big, flashy job with the great salary goes away.  God loves us no matter who we are or how we earn a living.

When we choose to live into our baptism, when we choose to live according to God’s way, we make it possible for our world to see and experienced that accepting love of God.  We change the equation.  One light, by itself, no matter if it is wielded by Jesus Christ, is not going – by itself – to brighten things up much.  But together, we are a light that burns brightly.

Don’t think you can make a difference?  Don’t short-change yourself.  Each of you changes the world every time you choose to live out God’s love.  

Years ago, I saw a short movie that went like this:  a train’s about to leave the station. At the last possible moment, three college students jump aboard.  As they pile into the train car, they see a Muslim woman, wearing a hijab, sitting alone, and they start to taunt her…. Whatcha wearing there?  Where’dja get those tea towels on your head?  Ya know, here we use towels like that to wash the dishes!  As the taunts continue, the other folks in the car squirm in discomfort, but they do nothing.  And the Muslim woman gets up and leaves the car, with taunts trailing her out the door.

And then the scene changed… the same scenario – the same students, the same Muslim woman, dressed the same way, the same taunts begin . . but this time, the other folks in the car start complaining.  Hey, that’s not funny. . . we don’t do that here. . .and this time, the students stop, try to bluster an explanation, but everyone says, no, we don’t like that, and this time the students get up and leave, shamed by their peers.  

That’s choice in action.  Together, willing and choosing to follow Christ by saying stop when we see something wrong.  

Choosing to live into our baptism, to follow Jesus, doesn’t mean there will be no darkness, no sadness, no failure, no death.  But it does mean we will make a difference.  It does mean we will never be alone on the journey.  

Every day we have choices, but this is the most important one – to choose, once again, to live as Jesus calls us to live, to spend our energy building up our community, to turn away from casual meanness, to do the right even when it is hard.

Every day, we can choose:  

Will you, today, follow Jesus?

Will you turn away from anger?  Will you avoid gossip? take only your fair share?

Will you turn toward good?  Will you hold the door open for the next person?

Will you stand up to our world’s bullies?

Will you come back again next week, to praise God, and renew your faith?

Today, and every day, Choose Christ and live.

Amen.

© 2022, Virginia H. Child

all necessary licensing & permissions are on file in the church office, First Church Middletown CT

A sermon preached at First Church UCC, Middletown CT on January 2, 2022

Jeremiah 31:7–9

⁷For thus says the Lord:
Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob,
and raise shouts for the chief of the nations;
proclaim, give praise, and say,
“Save, O Lord, your people,
the remnant of Israel.”
See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north,
and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth,
among them the blind and the lame,
those with child and those in labor, together;
a great company, they shall return here.
With weeping they shall come,
and with consolations I will lead them back,
I will let them walk by brooks of water,
in a straight path in which they shall not stumble;
for I have become a father to Israel,
and Ephraim is my firstborn.

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.

Every morning, when I was little, every morning, I got up, went downstairs, and my mother made me breakfast.  Every morning.

It didn’t matter what else was going on.  She made breakfast.  On Christmas Day morning it was a fancy breakfast, but every day there was breakfast…. cereal, toast, fruit, juice….  The milk was fresh, the cereal good, the dishes clean… every morning.

And when I was six, I could not imagine anything else.  She had always done that; she would always do so.

There’s a part of me that’s still astonished that my mother isn’t hiding somewhere in my home, waiting for morning so she can come out and make breakfast.

Well, of course, you know, and I know, that my mother is not hiding in a closet, waiting to come out and fix me breakfast.  But, I suspect we all also secretly wish that would happen… that the day would come again when someone would do their very best to take care of us, provide our every need.  Even those of us who always wanted to “do it myself”, remember the trust that we had, or the hope that we had, that someone, somewhere really cared for us, and that nothing bad could happen.

And of course, bad things did happen.  Even when we were small children, our parents weren’t perfect, sometimes not even close.  Even then, our parents couldn’t protect us against all harm.

Hold that dream in your mind, and compare it to the promise of Jeremiah:  see I am going to bring them from the land of the north…. with weeping they shall come and with consolation I will lead them back…

We all have that hope in our hearts that there exists a place where someone – our mother, God, the CEO of our company – will keep an eye out for us, will make us breakfast every morning.

And we’re all doomed to disappointment.  Because it just isn’t going to happen, not in the way we want.  

The prophets tell us that the Jewish people lived in the hope that when a Davidic king was finally back in charge, that every bad thing would stop, and everyone would be brought back with consolation.

But it didn’t happen that way. It doesn’t happen that way because it was never designed to work that way.

My mother didn’t get up every morning energized by the hope that she’d be able to make my breakfast every day for the rest of my life.  In fact, I dare say she was glad to shoo me off to college where, she hoped, I’d learn to fend for myself.  In much the same way, I do not believe that God intended for us to live in a system of perpetual happiness, with our every want and need supplied.  One of my commentaries says that God never intended Scripture to be a kind of existential lollipop, a kind of sweet and peaceful ease in perpetuity.

In fact, I think the real, substantive, nutritious plan of God is for us to find our joy, not in peace but in the struggle.

And maybe part of the struggle we face is the temptation to live back in that dream of nostalgia.  In September, Ted Koppel did a segment for CBS Sunday Morning (a show I never see), about Mt. Airy NC, where tourist go to get a glimpse of Andy Griffith’s Mayberry.   They go out of a yearning, Koppel reported, for a time when neighbors looked out for neighbors, where everyone lived in peace, and a fumble-fingers like Barney Fife could actually be a sheriff’s deputy.  

I really haven’t seen the story, but when I was reading about it in Wednesday’s Washington Post, I was struck by one point.  Koppel pointed out that the Mayberry everyone loved, that we yearned for, really only existed in the minds of the writers in California.  In the real world of that time, we were tortured by Vietnam, rent by the strong emergence of the struggle for civil rights, and disoriented by the changes of the sexual revolution.  But in the Mayberry on our tv, everyone was good, and kind.  Mt. Airy, Koppel reported, was filled with tourists, looking for a “real” Mayberry.

I’m going to suggest that we can travel far and wide looking for that place where we’re safe and cared for – we can even go to Mt. Airy, or Disney World – but the reality of our life is that the best place to be isn’t a place, so much as it is a way of living.  You can live in one of the most beautiful places in Connecticut – you can even live in Glastonbury – but if the best you can do is get into a literal fight at the School Board meeting – well, it’s not going to profit you one little bit.  That is not what God put us here for.

Forget the fight in Glastonbury.  What about the passengers who rise up out of their seats on the airlines and punch the flight attendants in the nose? And what about the famous politician who, just before Christmas, told a crowd of folks that it was a waste of time to “turn the other cheek”?  

How are we to live, in this world?  In this time?  Do we worry and wish for that world where everything goes well?  The one where our privilege kept us safe?  Here we are in a world where everyone is angry, where it doesn’t even feel safe to go to the grocery – again!  What happened?  How can we make this world worthwhile?  

God put us here to build community.  God put us here to be ambassadors of love.

God put us here to tell the truth.  Tell it with tact, tell it with kindness, but tell it true.  It is our calling to help others see the way the habits and customs of the centuries have harmed those on the outside.  It is our calling to help others see the way our world really works.  It is our calling to change those habits – in ourselves, in our community, in all our world.

God put us here to live in a way that makes for peace.  In a world rent by dissention, weakened by mistrust, it is our calling to make things better, by stepping away from anger and distrust.

God put us here to create places where people are welcome, where they feel safe, where all can be known as they are, and loved, as they are.

God put us here to follow Jesus Christ.  Maybe sometimes that’s as comforting as having someone make us breakfast.  Today, it’s so much more.  Today, we are called to change our world.

Amen.

© 2022, Virginia H. Child

All necessary licensing has been obtained and is on file in the church office.