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

First Congregational Church of Wareham MA (UCC), January 20, 2019

 

I Corinthians 12: 1-11 —   ⁴ Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; ⁵ and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; ⁶ and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone.

John 2: 1-11 —  On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. ² Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. ³ When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” ⁴ And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” ⁵ His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” 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.

 

Seth Godin asks:  do we have a chocolate problem, or do we have an oxygen problem?

Run out of chocolate, and that’s a shame. Run out of oxygen and you’re doomed.

Sometimes, we overdo our reliance on chocolate. It’s better in small doses–too much and it loses its magic. And sometimes we confuse the thing we want with the thing we need…

If your day or your project or your organization focuses too much on finding the next piece of chocolate, you might forget to focus on the oxygen you actually need.

Do you see what he means?  Do you ever see yourself having trouble telling the difference between the oxygens and the chocolates in your life?  How about in the life of our church?

One of the hardest decisions I make, all the time, is “is this book necessary?” – is it a “chocolate”? Or is it “oxygen”?  Is it essential to my life?

Because the work I do is almost entirely with churches like ours, churches that are facing a changing world, trying to tell the difference between the chocolates we love so much and the oxygen we need.

A few churches ago, I worked with a congregation that, like this one, had a beautiful worship space.  However, at some point, they’d taken out the original pews and replaced them with new, more comfortable ones.  Nothing wrong with that – and probably when they did it, it was more of an absolute necessity – oxygen – than any kind of chocolate.

But, they’d made a mistake when they did it, and the pews were too close together.  It was impossible to get into a pew if you used a walker, and not real easy if you used a cane.  The pews were close enough, back to front, that if you were bigger, taller, heavier than average, it was difficult to get into them.  When I realized the problem, we talked about it.  People thought about it, agreed that it was a problem, and then they said, “well, no one who comes here uses a walker, so it’s not a big problem, is it? Let’s think about it.”

Removing a few pews would have solved the problem, but it turned out that keeping everything the way they’d always experienced it was an oxygen need for the people who were there.  They couldn’t see how opening the pews up was an oxygen problem for the people who literally couldn’t get into the pews.  And of course, people who couldn’t comfortably fit in the pew only ever came once.

So – part of the challenge is not just telling if something is oxygen or chocolate, but discerning, figuring out, just whose perception is the most important.

 

In today’s lesson from First Corinthians, the apostle Paul tells us there’s more than one right way to be.  Some people, he says, have this gift, while others have that one.  Each gift is important; all the gifts together make up the whole.  It’s a big challenge to balance all that, and sometimes we get caught up into thinking that someone’s spectacular gift makes them more important, gives them more power – but Paul says that’s not so.  Paul tells us that every gift, every person, matters.  He says, over and over, that we are not whole when we live in ways that exclude people.

The other day there was one of those “oh so common” kerfluffles on the news – the Vice-President’s wife is teaching at what she calls a Christian school in Virginia.  The problem is not that the school claims to be Christian but that it bars anyone – adult or child, who is gay, lesbian, transgendered.  In other words, in the name of Jesus Christ, the school says that some kids are not worthy to be educated.  That’s not Christianity, it’s bigotry – and that’s why the Vice-President’s wife is being criticized.  And the justification is found in today’s lesson – where Paul says that diversity makes us stronger.  Our differing gifts bring us together, make us stronger.

We need every person’s gifts, and every person has a gift. Maybe your gift is the ability to welcome people with a genuine smile.  In my first church after seminary, we had a man who had that gift. He’d stand at the door and welcome people – if they were new, he’d make conversation with them and then take them to sit with someone who shared some connection – if the newbie was from Ohio, she’d end up sitting next to someone from Cleveland.  If they had just bought a place near Ernie, they’d end up sitting next to Ernie.   If they liked to quilt, they would meet one of our quilters.  Now that’s a gift!

In the same church there were other people with different gifts – one had the gift of leading meetings; another had a gift for working with children, and so on.  Together, they made a whole church.  Not only did they have the gifts they needed, but they were committed to recognizing and supporting those gifts.

And that brings us back to ourselves, here, today.  Paul says each of us has a gift, and the church needs all of us to be whole.  It’s important for us to name and claim our gifts, and important for us to work together, to support one another.  So, it’s not just about my naming my gift, but my naming your gift, my respecting your ability to do something that we need, something I cannot do.

Each one of us bring something important to the table.

Each one of us has a call from God to use their gifts to create and sustain a community of love.

Each one of us makes the world better.

Amen.

© 2019 Virginia H. Child

 

 

 

 

Congregational Church of Grafton MA, May 13, 2018

1 John 5:9-13 — Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal 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.

Yesterday I went to a three hour funeral of a beloved friend.  We gathered, almost 400 of us and shared photos, told stories, sang songs and listened for God’s word.

We came, knowing that dead is dead, that there is no life after death.  We’ve buried pets and plants, family members, friends, beloved and enemies.  And when they’re gone, they’re gone.

But this time, as the time together went along, we began to see something else.  We began to see the form and substance of new life arising out of the old.  We began to see death turning into new life.

Now, I’d planned all week to talk today about the eternal life that’s spoken of by the author of John’s letter.  I looked up quotes, found stories… all in the hopes of explaining the unexplainable.

Just how is it that what has been dead and buried can possibly rise and live again?  And what could something so inexplicable, so un-scientific mean to us?

But after yesterday’s experience, I find I just want to tell you what I saw and heard for myself.  Because yesterday, in its own way, I saw the dead rise and what I saw expanded my understanding of eternal life in a way I simply did not expect.

Let’s be clear.  I did not see an actual dead human being sit up and walk away.  The three hour funeral was for my seminary’s campus.  Andover Newton Theological School is a lovely set of buildings places on the top of the tallest hill west of Boston – from the top floor of the tallest dorm you can see all the way from Newton to Worcester.  It is a quiet leafy green paradise.  And on its best days, it was filled with people who all loved and served God, who sought to build community and share the good news of Jesus Christ.

But times change.  There are fewer churches, increased running costs, fewer students, more outgo, less income, and for the school, the beautiful campus, the sign of all we’d “always done” has been transformed from an important tool into a millstone around our neck.  There was never enough money to do all the necessary upkeep…

Does this sound familiar?  Fewer and fewer people attending, less and less interest, higher and higher costs, more and more expensive upkeep….?  I could just as easily be talking about this place, about our church.

So, if I went to Andover Newton yesterday to “say good-by to the campus” to attend a metaphorical three hour funeral, how is it that today I’m saying that I saw eternal life in action while I was there?

It’s because the time we spent together kept pointing out to us, kept helping us to see that the time for doing things the same way we’ve always done, the time for sitting in the same seats, in the same place, for running things in the same way, is over and done.

The time we spent together kept pointing out to us that every day we need to be willing and open to recognizing how our old habits can keep us from meeting the needs of the future.

Andover Newton nearly closed, but today it is a renewed, re-born, maybe even resurrected school on a new, to us, campus at Yale Divinity School in New Haven CT.  We were independent, owners of our own campus.  In New Haven we’re doing things differently.  But we’ve discovered that on this new campus, in company with the Yale Divinity School, we’ve shed the practices and expectations of the past that were holding us back.  We already have new students for a program that won’t officially start until next fall.

Think about what this means for us.  The writer of our lesson for today says that eternal life is found in Christ.  It’s not found in reverence for yesterday – that’s not bad, but it’s a poor foundation for tomorrow.  New life, eternal life, is found in putting Jesus Christ and the principles of Christian living first.  It’s not found by offering answers to yesterday’s questions.  Andover Newton found its new life by putting everything they’d been doing on the table, by gradually and painfully coming to see that their current situation had freed them from the cold dead hand of “we’ve always done it this way.”  That pushed the school back to its beginnings.

You probably don’t know it, but Andover Newton is the oldest graduate school in the United States.  Andover Seminary invented graduate theological education.  At a time when you learned to be a doctor or a lawyer by apprenticing, our ancestors decided that apprenticeships were no longer an adequate way to learn to help people deal with the crucial questions of life.

They started as a daring group of experimenters, trying something new, rebelling against “we’ve always done it that way.” That’s what the school – leadership, faculty and trustees – went back to a few years ago.. a beginning built on a willingness to put the past away and try something new.

We here in this church are in something of the same place as Andover Newton.  We are at a crossroads in our life.  Like that school, we can keep on doing things in the same old way or we can move out into a bold experiment.

I’ve been here now for just over a year and a half, and I know you to be good people, like my classmates at Andover Newton. Like them, we all like doing things the way we’ve always done.  We like the familiar.  We’re ok with a little change, done slowly, but radical change, putting aside the old for something that feels uncomfortable, well that’s not something we jump right into.  Trusting people we don’t really know to do the right thing, well that was hard for us in Newton too.

But if Andover Newton hadn’t stepped out on a new and different path, if it hadn’t girded itself up to go over all its programs and honestly discern if this or that program was part of our future, if it hadn’t been willing to give up its beloved Doctor of Ministry degree and any number of other things, well, it would have closed last year, never to graduate another student, unable to teach out the final 100 students, all of whom will finish their degrees.  The money was gone.  They chose God’s everlasting life, they chose to let go of all that was killing them, all that was dragging them down, drowning them, they chose to follow Christ.

And yes, I’m suggesting that we are facing similar choices.  The old ways of attracting people to church don’t work anymore.  I was raised in a world where one of the ways you proclaimed your status as a respectable person was by attending church.  Today, the Pew research folks tell us that fully one third of Massachusetts folks don’t believe in much of anything and no more than one third attend church regularly. Even well-read college-educated adults miss Biblical quotations because they’ve never read the Bible, don’t know the words of the Lord’s Prayer, and have no idea what we do in here each week. They have never been in a church, not once.

It is time, the right time, the ripe time for us to sit down in community to talk together about what we are called by God to do share the good news of Jesus Christ to one another, to our community, to the world.  Before us stretches the “slow time” of summer.  When we get to September, I want us to have constructed our plan for what we will do during our 2018-19 season to help our church thrive and prosper.

I’m not going to tell you what your goals should be.

I’m not even going to tell you what you should do.

We will discern these together.

I will only say this, that if our plans do not include doing things which push us beyond our comfort zone, if they do not require us to give up something we have loved or cherished, if they do not require us to change habits, we will almost certainly be trying to re-create yesterday, only in a different shade of color.  And even if we do the exact same thing superbly well, it won’t bring back yesterday. We need plans for today’s and tomorrow’s realities, not cherished memories of the past.

We’ll talk about this at Cabinet this week. Pass your ideas, your fears along to any of us who come to that.  The Cabinet will  plan times for us – as a congregation – to get together to discern where God is calling us to go.

And now, may God bless this church and guide it to new life.

Amen.

© 2018, Virginia H. Child

The Congregational Church of Grafton UCC, February 18, 2018

Genesis 9: 8-17  -When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. . .

Mark 1:14-15 – “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” 

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 February 1943, Langdon Gilkey was an English teacher at the Yenching University in Beijing China.  World War 2 had begun fifteen months ago, making it impossible for him, or for many other foreigners, to return to their native countries.  Everyone had scruffed along right where they were, but in February, things changed.  The land was under the control of the Japanese army, and they wanted all the foreigners gathered together in one place, under tight control.  And so began a sobering journey for Gilkey.

Along with around 1500 other missionaries, teachers and business people, husbands, wives, children from teens to infants, they traveled by slow train to a city in Shandong Province where they were confined in a former mission compound.  There was not enough room for everyone, there were barely any facilities – few beds, no extra blankets, not enough water for flush toilets or daily showers, inadequate kitchens to cook, no refrigeration to keep the food safe, and for that matter, not enough food.  If you’re like me and don’t quite know where Shandong Province is – well, it’s just west of Korea, at about the same parallel as PyeongChang, where the Olympics are taking place, and just about as warm and comfortable in the winter.

Langdon Gilkey came to the camp an ordinary cultural Christian, not particularly interested in the details of the faith, pretty much convinced it was largely irrelevant in a world where people now knew to work together for the best for everyone.  He believed we’d grown beyond the foolishness of greed and self-interest, that sin was an old fashioned concept.  And then he was asked to serve on the Housing Committee for the Internment Camp.

Because of the way people had entered the camp, some had much more space than they absolutely needed, while others did not have enough.  In particular, families with teenagers had two rooms, while families with toddlers had only one.  This was enormously challenging for the parents of the littlest ones – one 8×12 room in which to do everything…  The building committee came up with a plan to redistribute space – in fact, they came up with two plans to do so – and each time, to Gilkey’s astonishment, the plans were rejected out of hand by those who would lost space.

He brought the problem of space to four families, of whom he wrote:  “None of them is a troublemaker or uneducated.  …they’re all respectable.. and as moral as they come, just the kind that would support any good cause in their communities at home.”[1]

Not one of them agreed to share their space or make any changes.  One husband and father threatened to sue him, after the war, if he persisted in insisting on this change.  Even the missionary family refused to cooperate.  The Housing Committee had to finally go to their Japanese captors and ask them to force people to agree to the changes.  Only under compulsion were people willing to help each other out.

He wrote:  . . . I began to see that without moral health, a community is as helpless and lost as it is without material supplies and services.[2]

Why are we here?  Because, like Langdon Gilkey, we’ve come to realize that the world doesn’t work on the basis of good will to all people.

We’re here because we’ve come to realize that without the power and leadership of God, without the example of Jesus Christ, without the urging of the Holy Spirit, we’d find it enormously difficult to live in a way which nurtures community, builds up our world, brings justice and mercy to the downtrodden.

We’re here because without God, our lives would be only about me, myself, and my immediate family, and that’s not how we want to live.

God gives us church as a place to try out living by faith.  As Gilkey discovered, living a moral life isn’t so easy when our choices are limited.  In Shantung Compound every time someone got more, someone else got less.  There was no “more” for everyone, and so it seemed as though life was really about “less” for everyone.

Knowing the right answer to the question of how to live isn’t simple, or obvious, or easy.

Yesterday morning I conducted a graveside service for Lois Morris Mann, whom I was told had been active here more than 50 years ago (she was 95 when she died).. and, as I often do, I read First Corinthians 13.  I was struck by this phrase:  “if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing”  and it occurred to me that the God whom we follow says that love is more important than faith.

So the first thing I know about God is that for God, love is the most important thing.  It is love which can bind our world together, even when we cannot agree on the details of faith, and from that truth, all else proceeds.

Then I turn to the story from Genesis, the end of the story of the flooding of the land.  Now this story isn’t about the nature of floods, or the likelihood of them, or even whether or not one actually happened exactly as told.  Rather it’s  a story which takes the idea of a flood and uses it to illustrate truths.  It tells us that bad things happen; that some of them are catastrophic, and that God stands with those who have lost the most.

Scientists have spent years trying to prove that there really was a flood, or searching out the remains of Noah’s Ark, but the truth of this story is not in its facticity but in its truthful understanding of God’s care for us.

Our Gospel lesson tells us a third truth about God.  What God is calling us to, this life based on love, focused on justice, is not something that will happen at some unknown time in the future, not something that we should just sit patiently and wait for.  It is something that is right here, right now.  Jesus said, “the time is fulfilled , and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe the Good News.”

This is good news.  We are not stuck here, in the midst of a world filled with tears, wracked by terrible news from one day to the next, horrified by yet another large-scale killing at a school.

We serve a God who calls us, now, to action.

We serve a God who calls us to stand up for those who are alone, to stand with those who seek to change our world for the better.

We serve a God who promises that we will never be left alone in disaster, promises that it is love which is the foundational principle of our world.

And that is the Good News for today.

Amen.

© 2018, Virginia H. Child

 

[1]Langdon Gilkey: Shantung Compound, Harper & Row, New York City, 1966, p. 82.

[2] Ibid., p. 76.

This morning I officiated at a graveside funeral service – essentially all the funeral plus the committal to the burial space.  It was a beautiful day, warm for this time of the year, and for a blessing, not the least bit windy at the top of the hill in the cemetery.  Burials in New England, in the winter months, can be really unpleasant.  This was lovely.

The deceased, a 95 year old widow, had walked away from church participation (and, so far as her children knew, all relationship to God), upon the sudden death of her first husband.  Her happy re-marriage did not bring her back to faith.

That said, they reported that she was a loving, kind and generous woman, beloved by her children, her second family, grandchildren and all.  So, there I was, officiating at a service for a woman I will never meet, in the midst of family members who have all moved away from our little town: today was the only time I will ever see these people.

It was all made more interesting because the funeral home gave me the wrong address for the cemetery.  Who knew that our town runs both town cemetaries out of one office, while the two are a good five miles apart?  Who’d have expected that half the family was at the right spot, while the other half were with me, at the “right” address, but wrong location?  Fortunately, someone had a phone, and we were soon on the way to the right spot, our very own mini-funeral procession, and no one was inconveniences by waiting an extra five minutes for our arrival.  Moral of the story?  First, check those addresses.  Second?  Always plan to arrive early.

There’s always a question as to just how much “proclamation of the Gospel” is appropriate at such a service.  I’ve known pastors who’d preach a full-on, come-to-Jesus sermon over the casket of the dearly departed — but mostly I hear of them from the folks who were so turned off by the experience that the first thing they ask me is, “do you preach sermons at funerals?”    And “yes” is definitely the wrong answer because these folks already know that sermons are a bad thing.

So, how exactly can I share God with these people?  I try to do it in a number of ways.  First, I am hospitable.  When the family comes to me, I welcome them as they are.  Sometimes they’re enormously embarrassed that they’ve had so little to do with church; I do my best to get them beyond that.

Secondly,  I encourage the family to be truthful, at least among ourselves.  If Dad had two families, let’s talk about that; then when I speak, I will not be saying things that everyone knows are false.  In one of my earliest funerals, I buried a man who was a poacher and a wife-beater — drunk every Saturday night.  Had I not been told those things, I might well have made a fool of the church in my comments; knowing the truth, I was able to offer comfort to a family that was just as glad he was gone.

And thirdly, I concentrate on the Gospel of Love – not uncritical, sloppy-agape love, but that love which welcomes us home. I am absolutely convinced that Love is the foundation of Christian life.  You can believe all the creeds in the world, but as Paul says, if you have not love. . .   And conversely, if you have love, then you are part of God’s family.  I do not believe it serves God’s interests or anyone else’s to use the funeral as an occasion to suggest that the deceased fell short of God’s plan, or ought to have been a stronger church member.

Most of the time, I do funerals. memorial services and committals for people I will never see again.  Living as I do in a place where my denomination was for many many years the “official” church without which it wasn’t possible to have a legal town, it seems as though it’s part of my call to pastor in need those who have no church affiliation.  It is my intention, hope and prayer that when the family leaves the service they know that they have met a way of living which is welcoming and affirming and which intentionally preaches a gospel of love.  Maybe they’ll check out church when they go home; maybe they’ll tell their friends about the good experience.  Maybe they’ll grow in their appreciation of the place God can have in their lives.  For sure, in every case, they will have heard and seen a Gospel of Love.

Congregational Church of Grafton MA UCC, February 11, 2018

2 Kings 2:1-12 – When they had crossed, Elijah said to Elisha, “Tell me what I may do for you, before I am taken from you.”   Elisha said, “Please let me inherit a double share of your spirit.” 

Mark 9:2-9 – Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”

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 is full of the incomprehensible.  Anyone who thinks they totally understand what’s going on is deluding themselves.

Now, sure, some people understand how to build engines, or how to teach this or that; some blessed people know how to bake or make wonderful meals.  Some really smart people understand computers, write code, or clean up computers after they’re infected with a malicious code.

And most of us can find our way from Grafton to wherever we need to go; we can ask Siri, or use a GPS, or read a map.

I’m not talking about that kind of knowledge.

I’m talking about the miracle of growth – just how is it that I can feed a puppy dog chow – an unappealing, hard, crunchy food – and the dog turns it into sleek & glossy fur, grows from a pound of blind puppy into a 40 pound expert sheepherding dog?

I’m talking about the miracle of meaning and purpose – just how is it that we come to understand that life has its best meaning when we serve our community?  I’ve been reading General Alexander Archer Vandegrift’s story of the battle of Guadalcanal.  What is it that made it possible for all those men to fight so hard in such a strange place, to fight knowing they were likely to die? Fifteen thousand American men  – and close to 30,000 Japanese were killed or wounded there.  Why do we love our country so much that we’ll give up our lives, our freedoms, to keep it safe?

Last week I read a newspaper story about a newbie UCC pastor, who’d given up a $200,000 a year job at Harvard to be a $50,000 a year pastor in rural Ohio.  What makes that happen?

And of course, there are the other class of unanswerable question, which ask “why did this happen and not that?” or “why me, why my mother, my spouse, my child”.

Life is mysterious and filled with unanswerable questions.

Today is a time in the church year when we try to grapple with some of those unanswerable questions.  We begin with the story of the death of Elijah and the emergence of his student, Elisha, and then move onto a story of the emergence of Jesus as a person of spiritual power.  Each story is an attempt to both answer and ask questions about what is important, and how we recognize it.

In the midst of the worst time in his life, the death of his teacher, Elisha finds new life, new meaning, new purpose by picking up Elijah’s mantle, by carrying on his work.  It’s a reminder that the work we do, whether we’re religious leaders, or parents, or whatever, is part of an ever-flowing stream of living.  We live on our own timelines, but life in general goes along on God’s timeline.

Jesus didn’t do what he did to make himself a big thing; he brought his entire self into God’s way of being, and by doing that to give us a way to see and understand what God was calling the world to do and be.  In much the same way, when we live out the Jesus Way in our lives, we help others to see and understand God’s call.

The gospel story tries to tell us what happened when you really listened to Jesus, really paid attention to what he was saying – it was such a glorious experience that it seemed to Peter and James and John as though he was transfigured into a glorious being, as if Elijah and Moses had shown up and they were all talking together.  And then Peter suggested they build dwellings, which would allow them all to stay there in the midst of transforming glory.

But everyone has to come down off the mountain top. We can’t stay in church 24/7, but have to take our experiences of that glory, our memories of what it was like to be in God’s presence, out into the world, so that those who are lost, or lonely, or living in fear, might, through us, be brought to a place of justice and peace, built on our love for God and for one another.

God in Christ came to us that we might see and learn and know a new way of being, that we might not just exist, but prosper, enjoying a life filled with meaning.

There are times together,  times of transfiguration, so filled with meaning and joy that we just want to stay there, to enjoy the feeling of being in God’s presence.  It’s like being at the most wonderful concert, or most beautifully-played game, an experience we just don’t want to stop.

Underneath the special-ness of that experience, however, is another kind of transfiguration, the transfiguration of the everyday, the illumination of daily living and its transformation from one task after the other into a way of being which brings transformation and transfiguration into our daily world.

And that’s our call; that’s our task.  We are called and commissioned to make love our watchword, make justice our goal, and by doing so, to bring transformation to all the world.

And in the name of Jesus Christ, we will do so.

Amen.

© 2018, Virginia H. Child

The Congregational Church of Grafton MA UCC on January 28, 2018

I Corinthians 8:1-13 – Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up

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.

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Have you ever gone into a meeting and heard someone puffed up on knowledge tell you how to do whatever, the right way?  Ever made your favorite dessert for a party and then had someone tell you, you did it wrong?

Knowledge puffs up.  I know a better way to make chocolate chip cookies than you do, and I don’t miss a chance to tell you that you’re using the wrong kind of fat – butter? Crisco? Margarine?  The wrong kind of nuts – pecans? Walnuts? None at all???  And don’t even go to what kind of chocolate… Nestle’s chips? Store brand chips? Custom chopped very very expensive chocolate?  Small cookies or dinner plate sized? Crisp or chewy?  And I bet you know lots of other variations…  Whatever you choose, mine is the one right way and all the others are not quite right.

And if I keep spouting off like that, it won’t be long before you don’t even want to have a cup of tea – no, not Earl Grey, but the one right kind – with me.

Knowledge puffs up.

Love says, wow you have a different way to make those cookies, and doesn’t judge them on how far they veer from my right recipe.  Love is open to new ideas, welcomes input from others.  Knowledge is about facts.   Love is about relationship..

Of course, we’ve all met the know-it-all who thinks they’re the authority on whatever…   Alexander Pope wrote:  a little learning is a dangerous thing, drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring,  and for sure, it’s dangerous to just skim the textbook.  But Paul’s advice to us is more than a critique of those who don’t know what they don’t know.

Paul is telling us that it is not knowledge which composes the foundation of our lives, but rather it is love.  That’s what he was worried about with the church in Corinth.  They’d gotten so fixed on doing things the right, the accustomed way, that they couldn’t do things in the loving way.

In today’s lesson, the immediate problem folks are facing is whether or not to eat meat…not because they all wanted to be vegans, but because in those days, all meat was ritually offered to a god before it was butchered, and eating the meat was widely seen as an act of worship to that god – not to our God, but to some deity or another in the community.

The Corinthian church has a strong faction of well-educated, well-to-do, relatively sophisticated members who believe that Christians should be free to eat meat offered to idols. The reason is very simple. Idols do not exist and, therefore, have no power, since there is no God but one, as proclaimed in the Shema of Israel. For such people, this is obvious to all those “in the know.”^[1] And there lies the problem.  Those who know the right way think they are better and use their knowledge to put down others for whom eating meat that’s been offered to idols feels wrong.

In other words, in their day, the question is not all that different that whether or not to accept as a gift something that’s been stolen, or to deal with a business owner whose morals you find disgusting – or maybe whether or not to vote for someone who doesn’t always do exactly what you want.

But there’s another question in this text, because the Corinthians are not just wondering whether nor not the moral choice is Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump.  Some of them have “studied” the issue and know the right answer and so they’re lording it over the others, trying to cram their answers down others’ throats.  For Paul, that’s the larger issue.  It’s not who’s right, but how do you handle the conversation.

I’ll bet you’ve met people who know all the right answers, who are quick to tell you that they have the answer to whatever ails you.  Professor Kate Bowler, who teaches at Duke Divinity School, has stage 4 colon cancer.  It is incurable and she lives with the fact that she’s not going to live to be 90; in fact, she might well be gone by summer.  She writes that when she goes to parties, strangers come up to her with what they know is the right things to say:

Some people minimize spiritually by reminding me that cosmically, death isn’t the ultimate end. “It doesn’t matter, in the end, whether we are here or ‘there.’ It’s all the same,” said a woman in the prime of her youth. She emailed this message to me with a lot of praying-hand emoticons. I am a professor at a Christian seminary, so a lot of Christians like to remind me that heaven is my true home, which makes me want to ask them if they would like to go home before me. Maybe now?

Atheists can be equally bossy by demanding that I immediately give up any search for meaning. One told me that my faith was holding me hostage to an inscrutable God, that I should let go of this theological guesswork and realize that we are living in a neutral universe. But the message is the same: Stop complaining and accept the world as it is.  (Kate Bowler, NY Times, January 26, 2018)

All the good intentions in the world can’t keep us from occasionally putting our foot in it.

But that doesn’t mean that good intentions are worthless.  Far from it.

It’s our good intentions – intentions to not hurt people or whatever – which open our eyes to the way in which unintentional superiority can hurt the other, because superiority is not built on love.

Knowing all the rules doesn’t bring us closer to God.

I wish it did.  I wish that all there was about following God was reading and even memorizing a rulebook.  The Bible’s a little too large to memorize, but there used to be a Manual for Congregational Christian Churches, and it wasn’t very thick.

Unfortunately, like most rule books, it is all about how to organize committees, and what parts there should be in a worship service.  When it came to guidance on how to live the Christian life, well, we’d be better off, much better off, memorizing Mary Oliver’s poetry.

Today’s lesson is all about falling into the trap of thinking we know the right way to do or to be, and then getting all hot and bothered when others don’t go along with our ideas.  And it’s all about the trap of thinking that because we know the right way, that we are closer to God than anyone.

In fact, God loves us when we don’t know the right answer.  God loves us when we don’t even know the right questions.  Moreover, God loves that person who doesn’t have the same answer, whose answer is wrong.  God loves them when they are wrong.  God loves us when we are wrong.

God’s everlasting, reliable, trustworthy love is something we don’t have to work for; it’s right there in front of us.  Right answer, wrong answer, if it comes with love, it is of God.

And from Mary Oliver:

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood.

 

How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs.

How rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity while we ourselves dream of rising.

How two hands touch and the bonds will never be broken.

How people come, from delight or the scars of damage, to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.[2]

Amen.

© 2018, Virginia H. Child

^[1] Rigdon, V. B. (2008). Pastoral Perspective on 1 Corinthians 8:1–13. In D. L. Bartlett & B. B. Taylor (Eds.), Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year B (Vol. 1, p. 302). Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

[2] Mary Oliver, “Mysteries, Yes”, Devotions, 2017, Penguin, New York City, p. 85

The Congregational Church of Grafton UCC, December 31, 2017

Galatians 4:4-7  So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.

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.

Christmas is over and done.

Trees are already down, pulled out to the side of the road, done shedding needles in the carpet, except for that pile that’s worked its way under the doormat.

• The egg nog is almost gone, unless you’ve saved some for tomorrow night.
• Wrapping paper – it’s out in the trash.
• New toys – some are already broken.

New books – my favorite present – already started and one’s already been read and moved to the pile to go to the library.

The Holiday stream on my internet radio station is still going strong, but yesterday for a while, it looked like we were working our way through a playlist of Latvian carols, or at least the less familiar… really… isn’t it time to let the music go, and put “Jesus Christ the Apple Tree” away until next year?  Time to go back to the Peer Gynt Suite and other non-holiday pieces!

Christmas is over and done.

The meals have been served, eaten, cleaned up after… we’ve demolished the remains of the Christmas turkey, or ham, or whatever. The pot pies are gone, even the turkey soup has dried up.   And now the Christmas cookies are about gone.

Christmas is over and done.

But you know what?  Winter is still here.  No I don’t mean that cold stuff outside the door.  Not that kind of winter… but the winter of a soul that cannot see spring, that is blind to good, that thinks that all the world is broken and worthless.

And because we live in a world where there’s always some winter… I think we need to hold on to Christmas a little longer.  Not the cookies or presents, not the music or the parties, but Christmas, that spirit of love and joy and caring.

It’s winter at the Thursday Café – the one that’s at All Saints Church in Worcester, serving lunch and offering a warm, indoor place to schmooze for the homeless of Worcester.  It’s always winter when there are homeless people.  Poverty, soul-destroying, heart-aching, hunger-filled poverty is one of the surest signs of the kind of winter I’m talking about.

It’s winter for those Puerto Ricans who’ve fled their destroyed Island for the likes of Worcester and New Bedford.  I love both places, but how bad does Puerto Rico have to be that New Bedford is an improvement?  There are 351 municipalities in Massachusetts.  New Bedford is number 346 in per capita income and almost a quarter of the population lives below the poverty level.  And it’s cold in New Bedford, right around 18 today.  It’s in the 80s in Puerto Rico.

But it’s always winter when you’re driven out of your home – whether because of storm damage, or because there’s a war going on outside your door, or because the drug lords of Central America want your kid to work for them.  That’s the winter of fear, and we need to keep Christmas to push that fear away.

And it’s winter for those who live alone, for those who had no celebration this year because there’s no one to celebrate with.  No presents, no dinner, no family games, just another day, another tv dinner.  That’s the winter of loneliness.

So, there’s still winter, and wherever there’s winter, there’s a need for Christmas.  Because Christmas isn’t really about the tree or the decorations, it’s about changing the world.

It’s about pushing back the cold of homelessness, the chill of loneliness.  It’s about the warmth of solidarity with those who are oppressed by war or hatred or discrimination.

The reading from Galatians puts it another way.  It’s a short and sweet Christmas narrative – in the fullness of time, God sent his Son… and because that Son came, we have been permanently, lovingly adopted into the family of God.

Because of Christmas, we have a name; we are Christians.

Because of Christmas, we have a purpose; we are Christians.

And Christians are, that change might happen.

The work of Christians, our work, is to bring spring to be where there was nothing but winter.  We don’t have to stand at the side of the snow bank, waiting for someone to come and clear things away; we are God’s beloved children, and together we have what it takes to make a difference, to bring warmth and love and light to those in need, indeed to bring it to our own lives.  Because we are beloved children of God, we too deserve warmth and light and love.

Yes, this is the last Sunday in the Christmas season.  And if your tree isn’t down yet, I bet it will be by next Sunday.  You’re probably not listening to Christmas music any more, but I hope Christmas is still there in your heart.  And let’s keep bringing tidings of comfort and joy to all the world, at all times and in all places.

For whoever we are and wherever we go, we are God’s beloved children.  We have a name, we have work to do, bringing Christmas to our world.

Amen.

 

A Service of Lessons and Carols

First Lesson:  Do We Need a Savior?  Genesis 4:2a-9

Do we need a Savior?  The median net worth for non-immigrant African-American households in the Greater Boston region is $8, according to “The Color of Wealth in Boston,” a 2015 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Duke University, and the New School. The household median net worth was $247,500 for whites; $8 for US blacks (the lowest of all five cities); $12,000 for Caribbean blacks; $3,020 for Puerto Ricans; and $0 for Dominicans (that’s not a typo either.)

 Do we need a Savior? 

Hurricane Harvey, in late August to early September, was the costliest tropical cyclone on record, inflicting nearly $200 billion (2017 USD) in damage, primarily in the Houston metropolitan area.  Two weeks later came Hurricane Maria. At least 500 people have died because of the storm and it might be as many as 1000.  We don’t know because the damage to infrastructure was so complete. Most of the island will get its power back by the end of next February, but some will not get it back until May.

Do we need a Savior?

As of early November, somewhere over 200 people had been murdered in mass shootings this year, 58 in October in Las Vegas, last month 26 in Texas.. and it is the 5^th anniversary of the shooting of 20 little school children right over in Newtown CT.  And what have we done about it?

Our world is struggling, and this struggle is nothing new.  Hear this story from the book of Genesis:

Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a tiller of the ground.  In the course of time Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel for his part brought of the firstlings of his flock, their fat portions.

And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell.

The Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.”

Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let us go out to the field.” And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?”

He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?”

Second Lesson:  How shall we live?  Micah 6:6-8

Micah writes:“With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high?Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?  Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil?  Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”  He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you  but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

 Yes, there is a lot that is wrong in our world.  But there is good news as well.  Last January, when Victoria Islamic Center, a mosque in Texas, burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances, churches and synagogues offered space, money, and helping hands—raising more than a million dollars for the mosque’s rebuilding. They broke ground in May and by September they were distributing emergency supplies to victims of Hurricane Harvey.

In 2017, Church World Service, our agent of emergency assistance in the world, distributed 150,000 hygiene kids, about 25,000 school kids and almost 2400 cleanup buckets throughout the world.  In Puerto Rico:  working through the American Baptists, CWS shipped over 22,500 hygiene kits, almost 9,000 bungee cords, 2,550 school kits, 330 tarps, 200 cast iron stoves, and 50 propane tanks.  Through the UCC, they are sending 5000 more hygiene kits, 1000 water filters and another 500 tarps.

There’s no way to count of good deeds, done in the name of Christ, all around our world.  Love comes quietly, without much fanfare.

We will never know how many people turned what they heard in church into deeds at home.  We will never know how many men didn’t harass a woman, how many people held the door open for a person coming after them, how many people made the day easier for a mom with a toddler, how many people stood up for the poor or dispossessed.

But we know that love was shared, Christ followed. For what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

Third Lesson:  What are we looking for?  Isaiah 61:1-4

When Jesus began his ministry, as people listened to and became excited by his words and deeds, they began to look back into Scripture to find there the foundation of what he was proclaiming.

It was because he so modeled the words of the prophets such as Isaiah, that people began to proclaim him as the Messiah, as the one who would change their world.  And even today, when we hear these words of the prophet Isaiah, we hear the message of Jesus to us all.

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; to provide for those who mourn in Zion— to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit. 

Fourth Lesson:  Who will show us the way?  Luke 1:26-38

One picture is worth a thousand words; meeting one good person can change a life.  We’re not very good with abstract concepts; we all need pictures to help us imagine what life can be, to help us believe that life is more than Wordsworth’s “getting and spending”.  And every really good picture has a backstory, something that will give it even more power, tell even more truth.   Here’s part of Jesus’ backstory:

If you were God, if you were going to send your Son to change the world, how would you do it?  Send him to a prosperous family?  One with a passion for education?  Money for good food?  Enough prestige to give his ministry a head start?  But who did God choose?  And what does it say about how God saw Jesus’ mission, Jesus’ work, that the Savior of the world was born to an unmarried couple, refugees from political oppression?  Listen to the beginning of the story of Jesus and think about why he was to come in this time, this place, this way.

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary.

And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.

 The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”

 Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.”

Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her.

Fifth Lesson:  Jesus comes to live as one of us  Luke 2:1-20

Born poor, homeless, soon a refugee fleeing to Egypt..

 In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to their own towns to be registered. Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galileeto Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary,to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child.

While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.

 In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.

But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”

 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

Sixth Lesson:  They Went Home By Another Way  Matthew 2:1-12

The first glimpse we have of Jesus’ power to turn the world upside down lies in this story of “wise men” (scholars, maybe, or Zoroastrian priests), who tactlessly told the current king, Herod, that his replacement had been born.  The government was relentlessly corrupt, and, in the end, the wise men, refused to cooperate.  They went home by another way.

 In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.”

 When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet: “And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.’ ”

 Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.”

 When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another [way].

Seventh Lesson:  What Does “Right” Look Like?  Luke 10:25-28

In this story, Nicodemus asks the golden question, the one each one of us must ask of ourselves and of God. How will we live, which path will we choose, who will we follow, who will be our role model?  What does “right” look like?

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” [Jesus] said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”

And [Jesus] said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”

Eighth Lesson:  Light shines in the darkness  John 1:1-14

And so, our Savior is born, bringing us a message of hope and light, a message with the power to change our world.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

 He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

 And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

May you have a blessed Christmas!

 

Congregational Church of Grafton MA UCC, December 3, 2017

Isaiah 64:1-9:  You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways. But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed.

Luke 1:39-55   He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. 

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.

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Have you ever noticed how hard it is to see in the dark?  The last few night have been pretty bright, true… but how about those nights when it’s raining . . .and there are no white lines on the road . . . ?  It can get so difficult that you just don’t want to get out there.   Even though the lights on your car do work, it can feel as though they are simply not doing anything.

Christ came to be with us because living our world is often like driving on a dark, rainy night with no lines on the road.  We struggle to see our way, worry about driving off the pavement.

Sometimes, we just plain give up.  I know I’m very cautious, reluctant to take a chance, on those proverbial dark and stormy nights.  When it’s dark and hard to see the way, we move ever so tentatively.

Listen to one reaction to being caught in the dark – from Isaiah 64 —

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence— as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil—to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence!   When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.  From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait for him.  You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways. But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed.  We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.  There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.  Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord, and do not remember iniquity forever. Now consider, we are all your people. 

Do you hear it?  The author’s complaining to God:  You hid yourself and we transgressed.  It was dark, and we couldn’t see the way, and so we stumbled.  Please don’t yell at us; we couldn’t tell what to do.  Help us, for we are your people.

It was a dark and stormy night.  And who here today does not think we are living in dark and stormy times?  How many of our admired leaders seem to have gone wandering in a place where they can’t tell right from wrong?  How often have we struggled to see the right thing to do?  Even when the sun is full out, there’s a darkness in our world.

And in this month of Advent and Christmas, comes Light into the World.  Light comes to help us see in the darkness.  In the lesson we heard this morning, Mary sings about the Light and what it does for us, when she says:

[God’s] mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. [God] has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. [God] has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. 

Light shines in our world when we see those things happening.

When the proud lose all that gives them pride, when the powerful lose their power, light is beginning to shine.

Most of all, when the lowly are raised up, respected, loved and sustained, God’s light shines upon all of us.

When the hungry are fed, there is the spirit of God.

When the rich don’t take the largest portion, while leaving nothing but the dregs for everyone else, there is God.

That’s why Jesus came.  That’s why we call him the Light of the World.  Because with Jesus, we can see the way forward.  With Jesus, we can tell when we’ve gone off the path, veered off the road, when we dragging our car too close to the brush and scarring up the paint job.

In our public life, Jesus shines a light on the disgraceful cupidity of public officials, of those who have the power in their hands to make life generous or hard.

In all our world, Jesus shines a light on our personal behaviors, helping us to see the other as real and worthy of respect.

And in our private lives, Jesus gives us direction, helps us know right from wrong, keeps us company on our daily grind, gives us strength to continue to be witnesses for love and justice.

All this month, we’ll party, celebrate, give and receive gifts.  Sometimes, the gatherings will be with friends, sometimes family, sometimes work… and I know that some of them will not seem to have anything much to do with a Light coming into the world and turning everything upside down.  After all, we’re also celebrating the longest night of the year this month.  And when it’s dark and cold, gluttony can feel pretty good.

But underneath all that self-indulgence, all the office parties, and whatever, lies a truth that the darkness cannot hide.  Jesus Christ, the light of the world, has come to live with us and everything has been changed.

Power, gluttony, greed, misbehavior may seem to rule for a time, They will harm many, help no one, except those who revel in that sort of thing.  But their power is fleeting; it cannot change the inner reality of our lives.

In the wonderful book, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis creates a world ruled by a White Witch, where it is “always winter and never Christmas”.  The White Witch confronts Aslan, a lion and a representative of Jesus Christ. Aslan’s power changes the world… a prisoner of the witch, is racing along in a sleigh with her when he notices that the witch’s powers are declining:

Now they were steadily racing on again. And soon Edmund noticed that the snow which splashed against them as they rushed through it was much wetter than it had been last night….

Emilie Griffin writes:   After a few moments Edmund realizes that the White Witch’s spell has been broken.

All around them, though out of sight, there were streams chattering, bubbling, splashing and even (in the distance) roaring. And his heart gave a great leap (though he hardly knew why) when he realised that the frost was over. [Lewis]

Patches of green grass and green tree-branches were beginning to appear throughout the forest. Aslan had broken the White Witch’s power. [Griffin]

Though the Witch fights it every step, Edmund can see more clearly than she. Her slave the Dwarf holds Edmund hostage and keeps yanking on the rope that binds him. But Lewis writes:

This didn’t prevent Edmund from seeing. Only five minutes later he noticed a dozen crocuses growing around the foot of an old tree—gold and purple and white.

It’s a simple but powerful metaphor: winter cold suggesting the deathblow of evil in human lives; and springtime to suggest personal transformation and the redemption of the whole human race.[1]

Well, here we are in winter; it’s not as cold as it might be, but it’s cold enough in our world for the homeless to freeze, for the hungry to go empty away.  It’s cold enough in our world to take from the poor and give to the rich.  It’s time for light, real light, everlasting light.  It’s time to make the invisible, visible, and so we welcome the Son of God, our Savior, Jesus Christ.

O come, O come, Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel.

Amen.

© 2017, Virginia H. Child

[1] http://www.explorefaith.org/lewis/winter.html