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

May 5, 2024  First Congregational Church in Auburn (UCC), Auburn MA

John 15:9-17

 “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. This is my command: Love each other.

Acts 10:44-48

While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit came on all who heard the message. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on Gentiles. For they heard them speaking in tongues and praising God. 

Then Peter said, “Surely no one can stand in the way of their being baptized with water. They have received the Holy Spirit just as we have.” So he ordered that they be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Then they asked Peter to stay with them for a few days. 

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 Gospel of Jesus Christ turned the world upside down.  

And that turning continues today.

Jesus was born into, preached to, and died for a world where people had their place and were expected to stay in it.  Whether they were rich or poor, educated or illiterate, they were not supposed to move out of their class.  Knight or soldier, priest or teacher, slave or Roman leader… everyone knew who they were, and no one was supposed to change.

It’s not all that different today.  Even now, we are born into different worlds and we’re supposed to stay there.  Sure there are those famous people who move from poverty to wealth, but have you noticed how those folks are held to a different standard of behavior than folks who were born wealthy?  And very few of our multi=billionaires came out of backgrounds of abject poverty, where they had to struggle to get enough to eat, or to own a book of their own.  This is just the reality of our world.

But Jesus said it was not the reality of his world.  And his teachings have created a space where those differences do not divide us.  Here in this community, we are reaching across those lines of social class, educational levels, kinds of work, marital status — and we’re growing into building real relationships across racial and ethnic divides, welcoming in gay, lesbian, trans people.  

The challenges we face in naming our work reflects the strength of these dividing walls in our world.  

But we stick to it, remembering stories like the ones we read this morning.  The portion from Acts recounts memories of the emergence of a fellowship that will, in the years to come, become the Christian Church, gathered in many places across the eastern Mediterranean.  And in all those places, these stories were told and retold, to remind them that here, in the church, dividing walls are not supposed to matter.

In Acts, we hear about a time when Peter was speaking, not just to the folks who already followed Jesus’ Way, but to a mixed group of believers and the curious.  The believers were all Jews, the curious were outsiders, gentiles.  They were people who really didn’t belong, and yet, when the time came, it was clear that all of them had been blessed, despite their differences.

Acts has a number of these stories – there’s Cornelius the Centurion, who responds to Peter’s preaching, the Ethiopian eunuch, not only a gentile, but a person of color.. and there are others, each one of them making it clear that in God’s world, everyone is accepted.

If it were not clear enough from Acts, we also have the words we heard this morning from the Gospel of John, where Jesus says, Love each other as I have loved you.  And later on he adds Love each other.

Can it be clearer?  We who follow the Jesus Way are called to create communities where everyone matters, where rich and poor sit at table together, where old and young craft friendships, where our color, our affectional choices, the clothes we wear, the jobs we do, or whether or not we were born here, are simply part of who we are, and not barriers to full participation.  

It is not just God’s dream, or Jesus’ dream – something to hope for in the maybe of our future.  It is our dream, if we claim it, to be that place where everyone is welcome.  

Now, how we do that will differ according to where we are, the nature of the community in which we live, our resources and so on.  It’s always going to begin with the small stuff – holding doors open, smiling at the checkout person, being kind to those who help us.  But what’s next?  That’ll depend on what’s going on around you, what the needs are in your world.  Most of it, that’s your challenge, today and in all our tomorrows.

Amen.

© 2024, Virginia H. Child

April 28, 2024 First Congregational Church UCC in Auburn, MA

Acts 8:26-40

²⁶ Then an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Get up and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” (This is a wilderness road.) ²⁷ So he got up and went. Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, the queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship ²⁸ and was returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah. ²⁹ Then the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over to this chariot and join it.” ³⁰ So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” ³¹ He replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him. ³² Now the passage of the scripture that he was reading was this: 

“Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. ³³ In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth.” 

³⁴ The eunuch asked Philip, “About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” ³⁵ Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus. ³⁶ As they were going along the road, they came to some water, and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?”^,*38 He commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water, and Philip baptized him. ³⁹ When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; the eunuch saw him no more and went on his way rejoicing. ⁴⁰ But Philip found himself at Azotus, and as he was passing through the region he proclaimed the good news to all the towns until he came to Caesarea.

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.

Some years ago, I accompanied a colleague and her youth group when they attended the UCC’s General Synod, our national meeting that happened in those days every other year.  My friend was serving the South Dakota Conference and she’d brought ten kids from the high plains to our meeting in Norfolk, Virginia.

None of the kids had ever been east of the Mississippi River before.   All went well, and the kids were really invested in the meetings, spending evenings talking over the issues that were being discussed that year.  Until the day we took them to Virginia Beach.

Until that day, the ocean had been some mystical invention, and they’d not been able to imagine what it would be like to see that much water at once.  Nor had they anyway to imagine how different swimming in salt water would be, how different the scents, how amazing the sandy beach.  Yes, they have beaches in South Dakota, but they are all for fresh-water ponds and lakes.  Beautiful, but very different – much more closed in than the Atlantic Ocean.  And it didn’t hurt that the Virginia Beach boardwalk is lined with great places to eat and have fun.

From that day on, all the kids wanted to do was go to the beach.   Their focus had been completely changed.  When the meeting ended, they got back on their plane, sandy and sunburned, and with a new perspective on the world.

Today’s scripture reading is something of an odd story…. The evangelist Philip talks with a magic angel, and keeps getting taken off to new places… the other guy in the story doesn’t even have a name.  He’s just the “Ethiopian eunuch”.  But maybe that’s really what matters – what he was, instead of who he was.

So, Philip finds himself on the road to Gaza, yes, the Gaza where the fighting is right now.  And he meets this man we only know by his nationality and his physical state.  But they, especially the latter, were more than enough to put him outside the lines of acceptability in polite society, in religious society.  The rule was, you had to have all your body parts to be acceptable.  All of them.  If you didn’t have pair of hands, or something more important, you weren’t able to offer sacrifices in the temple.  And there was always a good deal of malicious gossip about eunuchs, just to make things worse.

The Ethiopian is an unacceptable man.  But the story makes it clear that he’s also a man of faith.  The traditions and practices that have come together over the years have limited him to an in-between space where he’s not out, but he’s also not really in.

Philip changes all that.  He explains the gospel of Jesus to the Ethiopian, whose immediate reaction is to ask for baptism.  History tells us that this man continued to share the story of Jesus, and while Christianity wasn’t really established in Ethiopia for another two hundred years, this is part of the beginning of that story.

When Philip told the Ethiopian that God accepted him, as he was, it changed the direction of that man’s life.  It changed his purpose and over the centuries, it changed his homeland.

Change is our theme for the day.   The Search Committee is circulating our profile, and we can anticipate a new pastor. Part of my job as an interim is to give you a taste of change, so that you’ll be ready for someone who will bring with them different perspectives.  

Change can be scary.  It can be unsettling.  It can cause us to mourn beloved traditions that are now sharing time and space with other ideas, other perspectives.  Opening up to new ideas can be life-changing, invigorating.  And it can be hard.

What happens when you see things from a new way?  Instead of automatically turning away, assuming that the outsider/imperfect could not benefit, Philip turned towards, and assumed there could be good.  How does such an idea affect us?  

Some change is going to happen naturally because it in things like new decorations in the pastor’s office, or a different selection of hymns.  We pastors do our best to keep singing the favorites, but sometimes it takes a while to identify them – and you’ve a great hymnal with a lot of good songs in it.  But out of those changes, you’ll learn new favorites.

Some change will be more intentional.  If  you want different results from on-going programs, or if you want to try a new project, then there will have to be changes.  Some changes, like the shelves Nathan Minor is building for his Eagle project, will be immediately useful.  Some things will take time.  And some of them will be failures.  

When those opportunities come along, I hope you’ll remember Philip and how, when faced with something he’d been taught all his life couldn’t happen, gathered the courage to turn in a different direction, welcoming in, taking advantage of the opportunity to think about what we do, why we do it this way, and where we want to be heading.

You get to practice now with me, so that you’ll be ready for what your new pastor will bring with vigor and enthusiasm and ideas for tomorrow.

Let’s all be Philips in the days and months to come.

Amen.

© 2024, Virginia H. Child

Acts 4:5-12

⁵ The next day the rulers, the elders and the teachers of the law met in Jerusalem. ⁶ Annas the high priest was there, and so were Caiaphas, John, Alexander and others of the high priest’s family. ⁷ They had Peter and John brought before them and began to question them: “By what power or what name did you do this?” 

⁸ Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them: “Rulers and elders of the people! ⁹ If we are being called to account today for an act of kindness shown to a man who was lame and are being asked how he was healed, ¹⁰ then know this, you and all the people of Israel: It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed. ¹¹ Jesus is “ ‘the stone you builders rejected, which has become the cornerstone.’ ^{k 12} Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.” 

I John 3:18

¹⁸ Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.

John 10:11-13

¹¹ “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. ¹² The hired hand is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep. So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away. Then the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it. ¹³ The man runs away because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.

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.

Nobody’s perfect.

Last week I talked about the terrible hatreds which mar our world, especially those hatreds which have led to the persecution and death of Jews.  I talked about how that kind of hatred exists, at smaller levels, and that even at those levels it is dangerous.  And finally I said that we are called by God to stand against the hate in our world.

I don’t know about you, but I think that’s an overwhelming task.  And so, today, I want to talk with you about hope, and struggle and what success looks like for us – not just when we’re dealing with hate, but in all our lives.

So, let’s be to it.

Last week, when we heard the story from Acts, we saw the beginning of a conversation between Peter and local leaders.  This time, when I read it, what struck me was that everyone in the conversation was a failure.  No matter what they were trying to do, they had not completely succeeded.  

Remember, Peter himself, the leader of the newly emerging Christian community, is the man who denied Jesus not once but three times on the night of Jesus’ arrest.  He’s definitely not perfect.

The leaders of the local community have nothing but difficult conversations and dangerous decisions – and they are not always making the right choices.

And yet, good has still happened.  Even when people didn’t do their best, even when they didn’t have a best to do, good happened.  

I want to be clear.  I don’t mean that good will always come, especially from the actions of the despicable, the mean, the greedy.  I’m not trying to set up an excuse for the criminals among us.  

People do, you know, do try to set up excuses.  I was reading a post on Facebook about famous people buried in East Providence recently…. It turned out that Raymond Patriarca, the late head of the Patriarca crime family is buried in East Providence – to my amazement, a number of people commented on how much they appreciated, respected, even loved this man, who controlled all gambling, prostitution, and other illegal activities in our area.  Those who wrote about him said he’d helped their grandmothers, that he was kind to little kids, that he supported the Church… and in their minds that made the murders, the thefts, the beatings and all, just fine.

That’s not where I’m heading.  I’m talking about how we who try to follow the Christian way can deal with the reality that we are no perfect.  It can sound like God wants us to be perfect, but in fact God accepts us as we are.  We are invited to do our best, not expected to never fail

In First John, we’re reminded that what God calls us to do, is not so much about what we say, but what we do, and how we do it.  That’s the foundation of moving ahead after we’ve messed things up, after we’ve made mistakes.  That’s our hope.  Because life is both good and bad, marked by both successes and failure.  Our hope is that, even when we fall down, the way we tried will still make a difference.

In the Gospel lesson, Jesus describes the difference between good shepherds and hired hands.  We try to follow Jesus, so we model ourselves on that Good Shepherd; the thing is, much of the time, we’re more like that hired hand. 

Now, given a choice between being the shepherd and the hired hand, we’re all supposed to want to be the leader.  And often our world pictures hired hands as if they are lazy, or uninterested; we’re supposed to want to keep moving on up, getting better and better at whatever.  If we meet 

Often hired hands are though of like the young man who mows my yard.  Surely this is not something he does for a passion for yard work?  Surely if he has ambition this is just something he does until something better comes along?  Hired hands just do it for money, right?  Or, they’re folks without ambition?  

Maybe really not capable of much more?  Yes, there’s a kind of hired hand who is in it just for the money, and sure there are hired hands who don’t care whether they do a good job or not.  But that doesn’t mean there aren’t hired hands who work right up to the limits of their abilities, who do their best to do whatever’s required.  Maybe we’re not owners, but we care.  

This is really important today, for we live in a world which often seems intolerant of the least shortcoming.  

I imagine myself as the ever-perfect Good Shepherd, and almost bow under the need to be good, all the time.  It is as if God is demanding perfection of me, and perfection is beyond my capacity.  But when I picture myself as that lowly hired hand, struggling to do my best, falling down from time to time, making mistakes, yet encouraged by God to get up and try again, it fills me with hope.  And I hope it does that for you as well.

God has given us a great opportunity to join in the work of making our world better.  And God knows how hard that is, how it involves hard work on our own bad habits, hard work in our world… God knows how we will, from time to time, fall short of our own expectations.  And yet, God keeps us on staff.  We will not be fired.  We will not be made redundant.  There is no downsizing here.  

Every one of us matters.  We matter when we’re at our best.  We matter when we’re not.  We matter when our spirit flags, when we just want to give up.  There is no time when we do not matter to God.  That is our hope.

In Robert Frost’s famous poem, The Death of the Hired Man, an old hired hand come back to the farm, looking for work, looking for shelter.  And the husband’s not so sure that taking him back is a good idea….. he’s not been reliable, left the last time over not getting a raise.  The farmer just doesn’t want to depend on him any more.

And undependable hired hand…. And yet, he has come to them as if this were his home.  The farmer says:

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.  His wife responds, “I should have called it something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

That is our hope, that God has made for us a home and it is a place we don’t need to deserve.  It is a free offer, made out of love.  God hopes we will do good in our lives, but God’s love doesn’t depend on that good.  It comes before any good we do, and it is our hope.

Amen.

© 2024, Virginia H. Child

First Congregational Church UCC in Auburn, MA, March 31, 2024, Easter Sunday

Acts 10:34-43

³⁴ Then Peter began to speak: “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism ³⁵ but accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right. ³⁶ You know the message God sent to the people of Israel, announcing the good news of peace through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all. ³⁷ You know what has happened throughout the province of Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John preached—³⁸ how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and how he went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil, because God was with him. 

³⁹ “We are witnesses of everything he did in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They killed him by hanging him on a cross, ⁴⁰ but God raised him from the dead on the third day and caused him to be seen. ⁴¹ He was not seen by all the people, but by witnesses whom God had already chosen—by us who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. ⁴² He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one whom God appointed as judge of the living and the dead. ⁴³ All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”

Mark 16:1-8

When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body. ² Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb ³ and they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?” 

⁴ But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. ⁵ As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. 

⁶ “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. ⁷ But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’ ” 

⁸ Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

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

There are two important things to remember today.  First, the resurrection scared everyone to death – this was so not what they’d expected.   And second, it freed Jesus’ followers to take up an even more frightening truth – the essential equality of all of humanity.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ was a profoundly disturbing event.  Even then, with whatever science they knew, they knew that dead men do not rise from the grave.  And if that was true of ordinary people, it was even more true for those who’d been crucified.  Death by crucifixion was torture.  And it was a death that tainted everyone who knew and loved the person who was killed.  Only the worst of people were crucified, their families were ruined by it as well.  Painful, shameful, dreadful.  And the crucified stayed dead.

But not this time.  

The women who brought spices to the tomb, spices to anoint Jesus’ body, were rightfully terrified.  When they were able, they told their frightening story to the rest of the disciples, and they were terrified as well.  Scared, hiding behind locked doors, fleeing from Jerusalem.  That’s our disciples in the moments and days after the resurrection.

You know, we think of resurrection as something which happened all at once, and so it did – for Jesus – but for everyone else, it was something they had to grow into.  It took days, maybe weeks, and surely lots of conversations.  When we read all the stories – not just what’s in the Gospels, but also the beginning stories of Acts, we can see it growing in their hearts.  We can see the resurrection becoming a reality for them.  And we can see them changing, changing from frightened people hiding away, into people filled with purpose, with a story to tell.

And that’s where our first reading comes in.

Now, this reading doesn’t happen on the first Easter Day.  But we can be pretty sure that it happened in the early days of the emergence of Jesus’ followers as an organization, in the time when they were working out just what it meant to follow Christ. 

The reading starts abruptly, in the middle of a story that begins like this:  a Roman centurion, a man named Cornelius, has become a God-follower;  he had not formally converted to Judaism, but he lived the essentials, and was well-respected.  One day, he had a vision of an angel, who told him to invite Peter to come and talk with him.  Cornelius sent off his slaves and a soldier to find Peter and bring him to Caesarea, where Cornelius lived.

Remember, this is a time when Jews and non-Jews rarely had contact with one another.  They didn’t share meals, and Jews were strictly limited in what they could eat.  So it’s especially significant that on the day the slaves found Peter, he’d just had a dream where God told him to eat from a collection of ritually impure animals, reptiles and birds.  God was insistent, saying Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.

And it is with that on his mind that Peter goes with the others off to Caesarea… and in the meeting with Cornelius, he says:

“I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every people anyone who fears him and practices righteousness is acceptable to him.

Think about those two lines and what they mean for us:  God said “do not call anything impure that God has made clean”, and Peter preached, “God shows no partiality; anyone who fears him/honors him, and practices right living is acceptable.”

That is the foundation of the Good News of the Resurrection.  Not just that Jesus lives, but that Jesus’ living is the proof positive of the power of God to tear down the walls that divide us one from another.

This is the what for which Jesus has saved us.  
The words Peter spoke turned the world upside down.
No one expected to ever see Jesus again.  He was dead.  He was buried.
And so we think the really radical thing Jesus did was rise from the dead.
But it’s not.

Peter shares the most radical thing about this Resurrection, when he says in every people – that’s everyone, throughout the world, anyone who respects God, and practices righteousness is acceptable.

Before Peter talks, he listens to Cornelius’ experience, his life, his encounters with God.  That’s the first step to destroying those walls…. Listening to those we’ve always thought were outsiders.

In this story, Cornelius is the outsider.  In the world of Judea, he was the stranger, the invader, the occupier, the unwanted, the unaccepted.  Who would Peter be visiting today?  

Think of all the ways we can “not belong”.  Some might seem innocuous… you put sprinkles on your ice cream, instead of jimmies.  Not that important, maybe, but it’s a sure sign you don’t belong here.  A grown-up might not care about the brand of their shoes, but for a kid, having the right shoes, or right clothes can be all consuming.  In some parts of our country, if you go to church you’re not going to belong, while in other parts you won’t belong unless you go to church (and there’s probably a right church, too).  And let’s not touch not belonging because you’re an immigrant, or the wrong race, or gay or lesbian or… well, we really do all know the many ways we cannot belong.

It doesn’t matter which wrong thing you are.  It doesn’t matter which wrong thing is standing outside the family.  What matters is that God has torn down all the dividing walls of hostility.  God says that everyone is welcome.  God has saved us to be the people who do the inviting in, who make this our community one loving space.

There’s a world outside our doors that wants us to live as if some of us are better than others, as if some of us deserve more…. And that some of us don’t even deserve food to eat and a safe place to live.  There’s a world out there that’s built on hatred.  But we live in a world built on love.

We know that other world is wrong.  We know that it’s not right clothes, not lots of money that makes us acceptable.  It is God’s unending love.   We know it’s not power that makes us loved by God, that God loves us at our worst.

And we know that living into that kind of extravagant welcome frightens us just as much as those first visitors to the tomb were scared on Easter Morning.  They didn’t know, didn’t understand, and almost certainly didn’t easily believe what had happened.  But they persisted, as we have persisted over the decades, and like them, we have come to reach out in love, to welcome the stranger, the person who doesn’t dress like us, act like us…… 

God’s love is born in us today as we celebrate the resurrection of God’s Son.  Go forth, and share that love with all the world.

Amen.

First Congregational Church UCC in Auburn MA, March 24, 2024, Palm Sunday

Mark 11:1-11 NIV

As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage and Bethany at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two of his disciples, saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and just as you enter it, you will find a colt tied there, which no one has ever ridden. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ say, ‘The Lord needs it and will send it back here shortly.’ ” 

They went and found a colt outside in the street, tied at a doorway. As they untied it, some people standing there asked, “What are you doing, untying that colt?” They answered as Jesus had told them to, and the people let them go. When they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks over it, he sat on it. Many people spread their cloaks on the road, while others spread branches they had cut in the fields. Those who went ahead and those who followed shouted, 

“Hosanna!” 
“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”
“Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David!” 
“Hosanna in the highest heaven!” 

Jesus entered Jerusalem and went into the temple courts. He looked around at everything, but since it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the Twelve.

Philippians 2:5-11 NRSVue

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, 
who, though he existed in the form of God, 
did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, 
but emptied himself, 
taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness. 

And being found in appearance as a human, 
he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— 
even death on a cross. 
Therefore God exalted him even more highly 
and gave him the name that is above every other name, 
so that at the name given to Jesus 
every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 
and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,

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.

About a month ago, Lizzy the dog went blind.  Her owners rushed her off to the vet and discovered that she had painful glaucoma in both eyes.  Her vision was gone, permanently, and the only way to deal with the pain was to remove her eyes.  It was devastating news to Lizzy’s family.  Lizzy herself was struggling with the sudden blindness.  Most dogs can adjust well to the loss of vision, especially if there’s another dog in the family – they’ll help each other out – but this had happened almost overnight.

Lizzy’s owners made the decision and about 3 weeks ago, Lizzy had her eyes removed.  One of her owners, Pastor Milton Brasher-Cunningham, wrote recently:

When we chose to have our sweet Schnoodle Lizzy!’s eyes removed about three weeks ago it was to alleviate her pain. She had already been blinded by her glaucoma, and the pressure caused by the disease was debilitating. Thanks to the counsel of people we trust, we chose a surgery that felt drastic and then lived through the two weeks of the incisions healing (and the cone of shame). Now we have had about a week and half of whatever this stage is, with all of us learning how to live, and there are new pains to discover, not the least of which is she bumps into everything.

. . . The other two pups have done well with her–until they hit the attention threshold and demand they get noticed as much as the Little Blind One. . . .  Both of them want to make sure we remember that pain in universal; Lizzy! is not the only one in need of comfort and care.

Some pain we live through, some we learn to live with. The pain of the glaucoma and the surgery are gone, but the discomfort of her blindness continues. Now it is part of our lives. As we watch the joyful personality that put the exclamation point in her name re-emerge, I am learning once more that we both shape and are shaped by our pain, whatever it is.  

(Milton Brasher-Cunningham, https://mailchi.mp/donteatalone/mixing-metaphors-the-point-of-pain?fbclid=IwAR0lk9-YYjGWNFaNvwDtX5sYmrKlBXScwx0-ME7Vy3R7eKoKa0TevwrryW4)

Lizzy’s story is not just the story of Lizzy.  It’s our story as well, because Palm Sunday, this week of extravagant celebration is really about pain.  It starts with celebration, but it’s not really about celebration.  It’s not about triumph, not about winning.  It’s about life, it’s about losing, it’s about pain.

Sure it starts with crowds yelling hosanna.  You can just imagine the parade scene:  Jesus is in the crowd.  People are thronged around him, trying to get his attention, trying to give him fruit or some other food, handing him a jar of water or wine to drink, just as excited as people at a Duck Boat parade for the Red Sox after that World Series win twenty years ago.  

Maybe, back in the corner, leaning up against a pillar are two or three of the disciples, just kinda mindblown at how well it’s all gone.  I picture them with silly grins on their face as they see success staring them in the face… you can imagine it, right….that feeling when everything goes well?

And then, well, there’s the rest of the story.  By Friday afternoon, just five days from now, Jesus will have been arrested, tried, convicted and executed.  By Friday night, he will be dead and buried, and the disciple will have fled for their lives, hiding behind locked doors for fear of the Romans.  On Saturday there will be no more silly grins at how it’s all gone.

That’s life, isn’t it?

And although we’d much rather listen to a happy story than a sad one, and sometimes we whine – loudly – about the absurdity of calling Good Friday, good… every once in a while it’s really important to stop and acknowledge the reality that all too often life stinks.

All too often, folks get sick and die, when we’d rather they got better and lived.

All too often, there’s not enough money at the end of the month.

All too often, those nifty new hearing aids  don’t bring us pristine, just like new, hearing.

All too often, our money doesn’t go as far, the government doesn’t do what we think they should.

All too often, the bridge fails, and it just can’t be fixed in a day or a week or even a year.

We ought to know this.  All too often the Red Sox don’t play well, right?  We’re used to failure, and now even the Patriots are going to be teaching us more about failure than we wanted to know.

Marilynne Robinson, the essayist and author, suggests that the sole purpose of the Bible is to help us deal with the pain of life.  I think she’s on to something important.  Our faith is not so much about reciting feel-good stories of redeeming love, as it about recognizing that those stories occur in the midst of pain and betrayal. 

Jesus and his disciples did their best and it all went sideways.  

It wasn’t because they were incompetent.  

It wasn’t because they were greedy, or always fighting with one another.  

If you look at the story of Jesus in the wider context, look at it from the Roman point of view, you really can’t find any way at all that it could have turned out much differently.  No Roman governor was going to welcome someone who looked to everyone as if they were trying to start a rebellion.  And the local civil authorities knew their own positions, their own lives, depended on defending Rome.  Even if they had agreed with Jesus that the world needed turning upside down, even if they’d thought he was only talking about better personal behavior with no politics intended…. There was no way they were going to support him.

Look, we live in a world where we’re all going to die.  I don’t know about you, but I’m not real happy about that.  I want to see my grandnieces all grown up, I’d like to see how they turn out.  I want to know what’s going to happen and I’m betting we’re all pretty much in that same place.

But once we realize that, for each of us, it will all come to an end, we have to work to figure out what makes life worth living….what will we leave behind?

This is the week, in our tradition, when we spend time in the midst of tragedy, in the midst of failure, knowing that death is coming.   This is the week we immerse ourselves in hope, because – this week – hope is all we have.  

So, look forward to the hope that though Jesus is in trouble today, it will be good trouble, necessary trouble, the kind of trouble that changes the world.

Look forward to the hope that though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet.

Listen to these words of hope, written by James Russell Lowell, in the years before the Civil War, when slavery was the law of the land:

Though the cause of evil prosper, 
Yet ’tis truth alone is strong; 
Though her portion be the scaffold, 
And upon the throne be wrong: 
Yet that scaffold sways the future, 
And, behind the dim unknown, 
Standeth God within the shadow 
Keeping watch above His own.

This is the week for hope, hope that next Sunday will come again, bringing love back from the dead.

This week, stand in hope, and look for love.

Amen.

© 2024, Virginia H. Child

March 10, 2024 First Congregational Church UCC in Auburn, MA

Numbers 21:4-9 — ⁴ From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom, but the people became discouraged on the way. ⁵ The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” ⁶ Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. ⁷ The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. ⁸ And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” ⁹ So Moses made a serpent of bronze and put it upon a pole, and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

John 3:14-21 — And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, ¹⁵ that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

¹⁶ “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 

¹⁷ “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him. ¹⁸ Those who believe in him are not condemned, but those who do not believe are condemned already because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. ¹⁹ And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. ²⁰ For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. ²¹ But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”^,*

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

These two stories, one from the book of Numbers, the other from John’s Gospel, come together in ways hard to predict.  After all they were written down at wildly different times, and for very different people.

That kinda makes them a great example of how different stories can work together to tell us something really important.  So it’ll be helpful to have a little background.

Our lesson from Numbers is part of the story of the journey of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt.  We’d love to think that journey, because it’s so central to our faith, so holy, was the perfect example of a perfect journey.  But the Bible never covers up the ways we fall short of perfection, and so, we hear this time, that the children of Israel have once again turned to whining.  If anything goes wrong, you can count on them to whine.  It’s their special gift.

Well, according to this story, the whining didn’t go well.  God gathers up poisonous snakes and sets them loose among the whiners.  People die.  (no, God didn’t really do this –I’m guessing it’s the dream of someone who had had to listen to way too much whining, but we’re asked to take it seriously.)  Moses prays to God; God tells him to take a poisonous snake, hold it up on a tall pole – then anyone who is bitten can look on the snake and life.

Now, don’t get lost in the practicalities.  Just think about this – God suggests to Moses that if the people look on what has made them sick, they can be healed.  It might not work for snakebite, but taking the time to look at what has made us sick, is almost always, one of the right paths to healing.

This is exactly what the medical lab is doing when it tests our blood, or whatever… it’s looking closely at what has made us ill, and once it’s identified, then healing can be helped.

It’s exactly what we do if we engage in therapy.  Understanding, as an adult, what happened when we were children, can be healing.  Understanding the dynamics of a bad situation.

And if you’re trying to figure out why the lawn mower won’t start, the first thing to do is look closely at it, right?

So, though the details of the story seem more than a little odd, the principle the story illustrates is true.  

And it is not trivial.  Sure, sometimes it’s easy to see that what the lawn mower needs is gas, but sometimes, most of the time, figuring out what’s going on is more complicated.  This is particularly true of those things we really don’t see.  If you can’t see what’s wrong, you can’t heal it.

It’s way too easy to keep doing what we always do the way our ancestors always did.  Habit hides all kinds of shortcomings.  God sent us this lesson to remind us that there’s just about always something we need to take a closer look at, not just in our personal lives, but in our social world, our work world, indeed in all our world.

All we need to do to see this wrongness, I think, is to practice listening to people from other parts of our world, from other worlds.  I don’t mean just listening to someone from, say, Samoa.  I mean listening to those right around us.  Here’s what I mean:

Years ago, I was doing an interim down in a church near New Bedford, and was leading a book study with a group of women from the church.  We were a mixed bag – some lifelong residents, some newbies, some Yankee in background, some Irish or German, some Portuguese.  They’d known each other for maybe thirty years, I think.  One of the Portuguese women shared her experiences when she was a child in New Bedford, and how, on her way to school, the Irish kids down the street threw things at her, told her she wasn’t welcome, no Portuguese were welcome there.  She wasn’t welcome in the school, or in the local Catholic church.

Her friends were astonished.  All about the same age, they had trouble believing her story, but it was for them a beginning, a time to recognize that discrimination is there for many of us, even if those who aren’t being victimized don’t even notice it.

So, we are called to listen, really listen, to those around us, those whose experience of life is so radically different from ours.

But where does the story from John fit in?  Well, look again at it… it tells us that at that time and place, one way to frame Jesus’ death on the cross is to see him as lifted up so that we can look on his love and be healed.  This reading is the complement to the idea of looking back at the bad; now we are encouraged to look forward to the best example of good that has ever lived.

That picture of Jesus, looking down on us with love, will help us discern the right path among all the choices before us.  It will help us recognize the evil in our world, to hear the stories we’ve not noticed before, and to let them change us.

Look on Jesus and be freed from the habits of being self-centered, and the curse off being oblivious to the realities of this world.  Look on Jesus, and be people of everlasting love.

Amen.

© 2024, Virginia H. Child

First Congregational Church UCC in Auburn, MA, February 25, 2024

Genesis 17:1–7 When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you and will make you exceedingly numerous.” Then Abram fell on his face, and God said to him, “As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after 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.

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 scuffed 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 where the Olympics took place a few years ago.  And those stories about how cold that part of the world is in winter?  They’re true.

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 hodge-podge way people had entered the camp, some had much more space than they absolutely needed, while others did not have enough.  Too often there were families with teenagers who 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 could not understand it.  The plans were good, they were fair, they were “right”.  These were good people; why can’t they see what needs to be done?

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 funeral for Win Bigelow, long-time member of our church, and in the course of the service we heard 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, the primary thing, the foundational 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.  

The covenant God makes with Abram is built on love, not on power or control.  It is a model for us of how the world could be… built on love, designed for justice, open to mercy.

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.

© 2024, Virginia H. Child

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

^[2] Ibid., p. 76.

First Congregational Church in Auburn UCC, February 18, 2024

Genesis 9:8–17:

Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark.^,* I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 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. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”

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 year, when I was a student at Andover Newton, then located on a hill in Newton, MA, we had a snow storm.  Well, we had snow storms most years I lived on campus, but this one was unusual.  In my memory, it came in April, much later than we had any right to expect.  In fact, the lilacs were in full leaf when the snow came.

As often happens, it was that nasty wet heavy snow, the kind that destroys backs when you shovel, the kind that is already half melted into water before it hits the ground, the kind that – last week – turned into ice in the night after the snow.  

You can imagine what happened.  The leaves on the shrubs and trees held that heavy snow until they couldn’t.  And when they couldn’t carry the weight, couldn’t bend, they broke.  Our huge, lovely lilacs … all broken branches on the ground.  Now, lilac being lilac, they came back, but I doubt that even now they’re quite as spectacular as they had been.

They couldn’t bend far enough to bear the burden.

Chris Mereschuk, the author of today’s meditation, reminds us that that rainbow was the sign of a covenant between God and all humanity.  Now, covenants are a special kind of agreement, not a contract, enforceable at law, but more of a mutual agreement with God.  When a group of people covenant to be a church, they create a church by the covenant.  When two human beings marry, they create a family by covenant.  And one of the things to understand about covenants is that they are flexible, they are made with the ability to bend to the changes of life.  

Bending, then, changing direction, is part and parcel of our life together.  Bending, understanding that the ways we’ve been going, the paths we have travelled for so long, no longer meet the needs of our world, is essential if we are not to break apart by those needs.

When I was a kid, when I went to visit my grandparents in the summer, we’d all go to church together every week.  And we always, always sat in the same place.  You do that, right?  Always the same place… sometime after my grandmother died, the church remodeled, took out all the pews and re-organized the space.  New paint color, new carpet, new pews, new layout.  And one of the major reasons for the change was the recognition that they needed to have a central aisle for weddings.  The old-fashioned, two-side-aisle layout, no longer worked.

Well, maybe it was just all the mothers of brides on the committee who wanted that change, but they made the changes, and the literal fabric of the church bent in a new direction.  And it is true that if your young bride has to go to another church to have a central aisle, she’s less likely to bring her family back to the home church…

My aunt was on the redecorating committee… she told me they argued about everything, including that center aisle, but came together to make the church work for a new generation.  They did not let disagreement keep them from doing what they believed would work best.

Now, I’d love to talk about fixed pews and the virtues of other seating options, but that’s not what this sermon is about.  I want us to keep focused on the importance of being willing to bend, because it’s bending to the changes in our world that is on my heart today.

It’s not been that long ago that when a woman came to church, she wore a nice dress, heels and gloves.  No woman wore slacks to church, right?  The world has changed.  And we have bent with the change.

It’s not been that long ago that if we had a child who had cognitive issues or maybe cerebral palsy that the world said the best thing was for them to automatically go to custodial care.  I’m not just talking about severe limitations or dangerous behavioral problems, but everyone.  Today, our world’s acceptance has changed.  We have bent with the change.

Now, bending is not easy.  Often it means letting go of the set-in-stone habits of the ages, turning away from what we’d learned as children was the right way to be.  It’s hard, but it’s also good.

Sometimes the changes we bend to are just things like colors or clothes, maybe they’re challenging, but on an every-day level.  But the more important things we need to bend to meet are often much more difficult.  They challenge the assumptions of our lifetimes.

One of the most challenging opportunities we face today is understanding how, for so long,  we firmly closed our eyes to the way Black people experienced life in our country and how different it is than how white people experience life. Just yesterday, I was reading a report that grew out of a study to see where we use our cellphones.  Cellphone locations can be tracked anonymously by using the weather apps or map apps like Google Maps.  It turns out that while tracking how long we wait in line to vote, it became clear that the “wait times were longer in African American neighborhoods than in other places.”^[1] Maybe that seems like a little thing, but everything that makes it harder to vote discourages people from voting, and we have begun to learn to ask why it should take longer to vote in African American neighborhoods than in white ones and who benefits by keeping Black people from voting.

In our world, more and more every day, we are opening our eyes to realities that are way different than the reality in which we’d assumed that all of us live.  We’re coming to understand that what we believed about the justice of our world, was at best incomplete, that the ways justice fell short of our ideals was and is embedded in our expectations of right and wrong.  

There are other things we need to bend to, other new paths to follow, but, for today, this is what I want you to remember.

God is always with us.  From time to time, in order to keep up with God, we need to allow ourselves to bend to new ways, different understandings of our world.  Some bendings are to pick up new good things, some are to bend away from old, even evil things.  Every bending is intended to free us and our world to a deeper understanding of God’s love.

Some of those changes may seem simple, others will seem impossible… but with God nothing is impossible.  This Lent, open your minds, your eyes, your hearts, to our world, and to the ways we are called to bend to serve it.

Amen.

© 2024, Virginia H. Child

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^[1] https://religionnews.com/2024/02/16/how-many-mormons-are-actually-in-church-every-week-in-the-us/?fbclid=IwAR2A5EsiHji2Eu04AcC6cUi58JtPHnxar3rLuMyCxPHify8CQIv8b4HvX3g

First Congregational Church in Auburn UCC, February 11, 2024

1 Corinthians 9:24–27: Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air, but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified. 

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 Apostle Paul was one of the great leaders of the nascent Christian church.  It could be said, quite accurately, that Jesus gave us the picture of what a good life, a Godly life, looked like…. and Paul worked out how to make that happen in a sustainable way.  If you think about it in today’s terms, it would be as if Jesus had the great new idea; Paul took that idea and founded a great company that changed the world.

But Paul didn’t know everything.  He was a man of his own time.  That means he came at faith out of his own experiences.  He was born and raised a Jew, active and committed to his faith.  He was born and raised a Roman citizen…. which in that time, meant he was a member of the upper side of the merchant class.  He was a solid citizen, but not a wealthy one; he made his own living, making tents.  He was a man, with all the assumptions that society then gave to men….  All this means that the people around  him saw Paul as a respectable, successful person with influence and power.  Now there were limits on that power.  He may have been a Roman citizen, but he wasn’t Roman.  Being Jewish meant something when he was with other Jews, but it took something away when he was with Romans. None the less, he led with confidence.

But, as I say, he didn’t know everything.  

Today reading from 1 Corinthians is a good example.  Paul wants us to work hard toward the goal; he wants us to know that following the Christian path is sometimes really hard.  But in using this “it’s a race” model, he’s saying that only one person will win the race.  True enough, for races, but not the least bit true when it comes to faith.

And, while that might sound like a little thing, it’s really key to understanding our way of life.  

Because God isn’t calling only the “winners”.  God calls all of us.

I have a friend who runs marathons.  She works hard at it.  Trains every day.  Eats the right foods.  Has a coach, a team of friends with whom to run, and does all this while teaching full time at her college, raising a family, volunteering at her church.  She loves to run; in fact a couple of years ago, she was ill and unable to run, and it was just so hard for her.

But she doesn’t run to win.  She runs to do her best.  

That’s what Paul is missing.  We don’t run the Christian race to win; we run to do our best.

Back in the dark ages of time, I learned this lesson at the Chester County 4-H Fair.  I was entered in the Guernsey calf competition, and I had a calf — actually by that time an almost-grown-up calf —- who had every good chance to win.  And winning was something I’d rarely experienced, not because my calf wasn’t good, or because I hadn’t done a good job of showing her, but because a girl just a year or two ahead of me in the club had the world’s greatest cow.  Elsie Dodds won every show she was ever in because that cow was fantastic.  It was discouraging.  I’d go into the competition hoping for reserve grand champion, because there was no way I’d beat Elsie.  

But Elsie wasn’t at this show.  And I saw my path clear to winning it all.  Imagine how crestfallen I was when, instead of winning the blue ribbon, I found myself part of a group, all of whom won blue ribbons.  I was astonished, and — honestly, angry — all the way home, barely able to listen to my father who was explaining the Modified Danish Judging System to me.

I was angry and I was wrong.  Because what the Danish System did was make it possible to really see how many of the entries approached the ideal dairy cow.  If you had a first rank entry, you were placed in the first rank.  More kids got rewarded for their hard work, instead of feeling like they were losers because there was always someone better ahead of them.

fwiw, I looked Elsie up on the internet; she’s in her eighties these days, still raising Guernsey cattle, still winning at shows…. some things never change.

So, here’s the lesson for us today — don’t worry about being the best in everything, because being a Christian isn’t a competition that only one of us will win.  Concentrate on that other kind of being best — being the best person you can be, today.  Maybe tomorrow will be different.  But make today the best day it can be.

And don’t wait until tomorrow to make things right.  Jesus told a great story about a farmer (I’ve always heard that his nickname was Bigger Barnes), in Luke.  Here’s how it goes:

“The farm of a certain rich man produced a terrific crop. He talked to himself: ‘What can I do? My barn isn’t big enough for this harvest.’ Then he said, ‘Here’s what I’ll do: I’ll tear down my barns and build bigger ones. Then I’ll gather in all my grain and goods, and I’ll say to myself, Self, you’ve done well! You’ve got it made and can now retire. Take it easy and have the time of your life!’

“Just then God showed up and said, ‘Fool! Tonight you die. And your barnful of goods—who gets it?’

“That’s what happens when you fill your barn with Self and not with God.”

This is all part of being a real church, a church that is a community of people — all aiming to be the best they can be, helping one another get there, reaching out and sharing love with all our world.

So run your race, not to be “the best”, but to do your best.  Let love be your watchword, today and always.

Amen.

© 2024, Virginia H. Child

First Congregational Church UCC in Auburn, MA, February 4, 2024

I Corinthians 9:16-23 (Message)  I’d rather die than give anyone ammunition to discredit me or impugn my motives. If I proclaim the Message, it’s not to get something out of it for myself. I’m compelled to do it, and doomed if I don’t! If this was my own idea of just another way to make a living, I’d expect some pay. But since it’s not my idea but something solemnly entrusted to me, why would I expect to get paid? So am I getting anything out of it? Yes, as a matter of fact: the pleasure of proclaiming the Message at no cost to you. You don’t even have to pay my expenses!

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.

Saint Paul wasn’t always the best writer in the world….and this is a great example, where even the best translations can’t make it clear.   Paul is trying to help people understand why he does what he does – boasting, which is the Greek word, just doesn’t work in our minds – it means something else to us.  So, listen now to this version, as translated by Presbyterian pastor and scholar Eugene Peterson, as he worked to move from what the Greek says to what it meant for his congregation in suburban Baltimore:

I’d rather die than give anyone ammunition to discredit me or impugn my motives. If I proclaim the Message, it’s not to get something out of it for myself. I’m compelled to do it, and doomed if I don’t! If this was my own idea of just another way to make a living, I’d expect some pay. But since it’s not my idea but something solemnly entrusted to me, why would I expect to get paid? So am I getting anything out of it? Yes, as a matter of fact: the pleasure of proclaiming the Message at no cost to you. You don’t even have to pay my expenses!

What Paul is trying to say, and what Peterson makes clear is this:  when we live the Christian life at our best, we are not doing it to make points with the world.  We are doing what we do because we can’t not do it, because we’ve gotten it, because we now know that what we’re doing, how we live, is more important than anything else in the world.

But why does he say this? Why is it so important that we know he wasn’t telling us about Jesus to make points, get ahead, maybe rake in a good offering?

Here’s at least one reason:  Paul is telling the world about a God whose foundation is love.  

Think about it.  Some people thought that the way you got good things from God was by making offerings. And if your offering was good enough, pure enough, expensive enough, then God would give you want you wanted.  You know how this works…. In our world, we all know about bribes.  

Down my way, with the continuing challenge of the bridge on 195 going towards Cape Cod, we’re hearing more than usual about bribes…. Did they happen this time?  Is that why the bridge failed?  Every time, any time, something like this fails, someone’s going to be asking about bribes.  Any time, all the time, when someone looks to be getting better treatment than you’d expect, someone of us will wonder if there wasn’t an exchange, a quid pro quo, going on.

Paul teaches us, however, that our God loves us as we are.  We do not need to pay God off to love us.  That truth is the foundation of our world.  It underlies every single thing we do every day.  Because God loves us, even before we do anything, we reach out in love, without any expectation of a quid pro quo, without any need for payment.  We love others because God loves us, and we love others the way God loves us – freely, without compensation, without earning any points for what we do.

Now think about this.  Because we know God loves us before we’ve even thought of God, we aim to create communities where all have equal standing.  

Because we know God loves us before we know God, we aim to create marriages where both spouses are equal.  We do not believe that one member of the marriage is in charge of the other.

Because we know God loves us first, we work to be communities where all people, regardless of their political beliefs, financial standing, age, ability, ethnic background, immigration status, gender, affectional preferences, or marital status are welcome, equally loved, equally honored.

We don’t succeed, of course.  The world, never mind you and I, is not yet perfect.  But that’s our goal.  God loved us, so that we would share that love with all the world.

I say that we don’t always succeed, that sometimes we don’t even try, because it’s important to remember that we,  and our world, are works in progress.  This is really important.  If we thought where we are was all there was, that this is as good as it can get, we’d give up.  And that would mean, even if we continued to come to church, that we really would have given up on Jesus.

Last week, a friend sent me a video of a toddler taking their first steps.  I know you have seen this – if not the very first steps, then for sure sometime in those first days – the kid has a vaguely astonished, bemused look on her face, like “what the heck is this that I’m doing?” as she lurches across the floor.  From time to time, she falls forward on her outstretched hands, and she bounces back up to keep on going.

The first time your toddler gets up on their feet, they’re not very good at it.  It’s kind of mind-boggling, however, how quickly they get better and better, and how much fun they have with this new ability.   

We’re like that toddler, except old enough to whine about how hard this is, or to wonder if crawling really wasn’t good enough – is this effort necessary, we might ask.  What if we just get one of those creepers they use to work on cars?  We’ll move just as fast with less effort.  It’s only $30 and comes in a nifty lime green.

Sometimes, we’ll do almost anything to avoid change and effort, even by getting something as absurd as using a $30 creeper to avoid having to make the effort to learn how to walk…..

Now, that’s so absurd that no one is really doing it – and this is, I want to add, not about actually not being _able_ to walk, but about being unwilling to put in the effort to move from crawling to upright standing and walking.

But it is kinda what happens with us when we’re being challenged by some new growing edge.  Sometimes the work – maybe physical work, but as often emotional work, of growing into a deeper way of living – is just really hard.  And there’s such a temptation to just step back and take a shortcut.

This past fall, a very conservative evangelical preacher named Alister Begg, was asked, on his radio show, whether or not it was permissible for a devout conservative Christian grandmother to attend the gay wedding of her granddaughter.  Begg asked if the granddaughter knew that her grandmother thought what she was doing was wrong.  Yes, grandma said, she knows where I stand, where I believe faith requires me to stand. Then, said Begg, you should go to the wedding, out of love for her granddaughter.

Now, I’m not going to discuss gay weddings, because this isn’t really about that.  It’s just the occasion for what’s turned into a real fight for Alister Begg.  So many of his conservative co-believers were upset that he told the grandmother to attend the wedding out of love, that they cancelled his radio show and he’s under personal attack.

Begg is in line to lose a lot of respect in circles that matter to him.  And so far, he is saying that he believes that love is more important than anything.  Every temptation is before him to step back from what he believes, to preserve his acceptance, to keep on benefitting from his importance, and he says, “no, that’s not right.”

We all get tempted from time to time to step back, even highly respected pastors.

But that doesn’t mean we’re failures; it simply means we are human.  And as human beings, we are able to get up off the floor, like that teetering toddler, and try again — because we are God’s hands in this world.  

We are called to make God’s welcoming love to everyone we know, in the communities where we live and work.  Because God loves us unconditionally, always, and for ever, we can get up off the floor and go at it again, every day getting stronger in our faith, clearer in our purpose, and more and more loving.

May it be so.

Amen.

© 2024, Virginia H. Child