Tag: faith

December 14, 2025  First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield MA  

Isaiah 64:-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.

Have you ever noticed how hard it is to see in the dark?  Think about those nights when it’s raining . . .and there are no white lines on the road . . . ?  There’s a church in my Association on a road like that, and it’s a place we’d often have meetings – but it can get so difficult that you just don’t want to get out there.   By now, so many of us have said we won’t run the risk that we’ve had to stop meeting there after dark.  No side lines, no center line, and the asphalt seems to absorb every bit of light — Even though the lights on your car do work, it can feel as though they are simply not doing anything. And so we’ve had to change the way we meet.

Living our world today 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.  

And, you know, we’re not just talking about driving up to Warren on a dark and stormy night.  That’s a metaphor, but life is real – there are so many times when all the choices, all the paths we might take are hard, maybe bad, certainly with little option.  

From one of the help columns I so love – this one in the NY Times:  A father writes in that his 30 year old son is so consumed with psychological issues that he is both unable to work, and unwilling to recognize his issues.  His parents are getting older; they’re finding it more and more challenging to pay for their son’s apartment and support him in other ways, given that the young man can’t hold a job, won’t take meds, won’t go to doctors, won’t even bathe or brush his teeth. How long, the dad asks, must we continue to give him money, knowing that if we stop, he’ll become homeless?  There’s no good answer to the problem.

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 is 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 there 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; … has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. [God] has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; … has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. 

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

On Thursday, I had a cataract removed, and while I was in the surgery center, I saw light shining – not just in the very helpful nurses who recognized my anxiety, but more importantly in the patient’s bay next to mine.  The elderly woman there was also in for some kind of eye surgery, but there was a difference – she was illiterate – she had to sign the consent form with an X – and she only spoke Portuguese, like many people in the New Bedford-Fall River corridor.  The clinic had allowed her daughter to stay with her and she translated for her mom… and when the surgeon, who is not Portuguese, came in, he joked with the patient in Portuguese.  The care and consideration the clinic showed for that woman and her daughter was light-giving.  That’s the kind of thing Jesus is talking about.

When the poor are respected, trusted, welcomed, there is the spirit of God.
When the hungry are fed, there is the spirit of God.  
When the lowly are raised up, respected, loved and sustained, God’s light shines upon all of us. 

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 comments:  

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

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.

© 2025, Virginia H. Child

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

Proverbs 1:1-7

² For learning about wisdom and instruction, 
for understanding words of insight, 
³ for gaining instruction in wise dealing, 
righteousness, justice, and equity; 
⁴ to teach shrewdness to the simple, 
knowledge and prudence to the young— 
⁵ let the wise, too, hear and gain in learning 
and the discerning acquire skill, 
⁶ to understand a proverb and a figure, 
the words of the wise and their riddles. 
⁷ The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; 
fools despise wisdom and instruction.

Luke 8:22-25 One day he got into a boat with his disciples, and he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side of the lake.” So they put out, ²³ and while they were sailing he fell asleep. A windstorm swept down on the lake, and the boat was filling with water, and they were in danger. ²⁴ They went to him and woke him up, shouting, “Master, Master, we are perishing!” And waking up, he rebuked the wind and the raging waves; they ceased, and there was a calm. ²⁵ Then he said to them, “Where is your faith?” They were terrified and amazed and said to one another, “Who then is this, that he commands even the winds and the water and they obey him?” and amazed and said to one another, “Who then is this, that he commands even the winds and the water and they obey him?

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

We’re in a funny spot these days…. About half way through the interim period, creeping up on that great day when our profile will go public and we will begin to receive candidate profiles (resumes)

But it all feels so slow, and it’s not easy to see.  Much of what we’re doing these days isn’t easy to see, you know.  Your leadership is moving into a new way of discerning where God would have us go, and different ways of making things happen.  I suspect that, for many of us, the results are either invisible or innocuous… that is, either so obvious as to not seem like much of anything, or seeming so unimportant as to not really be anything at all.

And if it’s hard to see what has happened, or challenging to realize what radical changes we have made, it must be about time for us to be thinking “we’re not doing enough”…  

We’re at that place like the kid who is down by the creek, in the water, and gets knocked over by the current and thinks he’s drowning, because he can’t swim – but he’s only  in 2 feet of water and is tall enough to wade, if he can only stop thrashing around and stand up.  Maybe he’ll have to pull himself out of the current, but he can make it.

We’re that kid.  

It’d be easy to say, oh we don’t have enough people.. because you don’t have enough people to sustain programs the way you did years ago.

It’d be easy to say, we’re not solving this problem right now… because it’s the one on my list, when we’re learning to prioritize and plan.

It’d be easy to say our problem is that we don’t have enough money, and we don’t have enough money because we have a woman pastor, or because we welcome gay people, or because we belong to the United Church of Christ.  But those are the kinds of fears we hear when we’re still looking back to the successes of decades ago, instead of looking forward to the opportunities of today and tomorrow.

Here’s what we’re doing to make a difference, to prepare ourselves for the next pastorate, for the next ten years or so…

Because without plans, yes our fears will take over.  But with plans we have a future. 

And we have plans:

The first plan takes advantage of our physical space, and our financial planning, to provide good ministry to our children.  Off and on, almost every month I’ve been here, someone has talked with me about children.  Your leaders, the Moderators and the Council, have put together a workable plan that uses our resources, doesn’t ask of us things we don’t have, and is an effective way to reach out to the youngest among us and their parents.  

In some churches the children’s program is run by volunteers, and even the pastor, but that’s not in our wheelhouse.  But what we do have is a good, dedicated child space, that – because it’s right here in the worship space is a safe space for children – and because it’s right here in the worship space, allows the smallest among us to be present in worship – and which is convenient and attractive.  So the plan is to put together a job description, and hire someone to watch over the children in the Prayground, freeing their parents to focus on the worship service.

I bet someone here is saying, so what are you going to do about the youth.  One of the lessons we’ve been working on is that we need to start out at a level we can keep up with.  If you’re just learning how to cook, you start with something easy, not Thanksgiving dinner for 20.  We’re starting with our youngest children.  When that’s running well, we will add a program for the grade 1 through about 6 kids – a Messy Church experience.  Again, we’ll look around for someone, this time, hopefully an experienced Christian educator, who will come once a month to do this program with our children.  

As Messy Church begins to stabilize, we’ll then look for a more formal program for our youth.  In the meantime, we’ll be inviting them to help at Messy Church or on Sunday mornings.  We’ll encourage them to think about being a Scout, because that’s a great program.  This will give your new pastor time to get to see the resources in the area and to figure out what combination of activities will be the most worthwhile for our children and give us the most bang for the buck.

Do you see what our leaders have figured out?  They’ve learned that you don’t need tons of people to make a mark, to have an effective experience.  They’ve figured out that good planning doesn’t just count money, it’s also counts people.  And they’ve figured out that the best plans pay attention to what people need and aim to provide it.

You’ve heard me talk about the trip our leaders made to the Elementary School a few weeks ago.  It’s a perfect example of the kind of right-sized, right-focused outreach that is so good for us.  Here’s why it did a superior job of sharing the love of God with our teachers.

It was right-focused – our goal was to do something explicit to tell our teachers they mattered.  So our leaders used their contacts to find out what would make a difference to them.  And when the word was that they’d most appreciate Clorox Wipes and Expo dry-erase markers, we listened to what had been said.  We gave them what they wanted, even when it felt like an odd thing to bring them.

It was right-sized – we only tried to bring two things.  There are other things we might have brought.  We hear they like Puffs tissues – good, soft and strong for little kids.  But we measured our capacity and felt as though two things could be done well, but three would be too much.

The gifts worked well, but did you hear what happened next?  While we were at the school, distributing the supplies (and the donuts and pastries we brought), we had at least half a dozen conversations.  We got the word out that this church exists and cares about them.  We helped the music teacher make a connection with the Senior Center for a Christmas Concert.  We listened closely to the school secretary talk about other needs, to see if there was anything else that fit with our skills and abilities… and it turned out there was.  Now our Knitting group is aiming to make hats and mittens so the school office has a supply of warm, dry stuff to give little kids with cold, wet hands…  It didn’t occur to the school to call us up and ask for mittens – why would it?  But when we said we might be able to help with that, our offer was gratefully received.

That whole project, which told about 30 people at the school that we cared about them, took about 2 weeks of time – time to advertise it, time to collect money, time to order stuff from Amazon, and then time to load it all into Deb Christensen’s car, and for Deb, Debbie Gran, Kitty Lowenthal and me to ride over to the school.  In other words, it was right-sized for our financial and human resources.

I’ve heard concerns that we’re going to have problems getting parkers for the 2026 season… here’s how our updated planning is going to deal with that issue.  Your leaders know it’s time for us to expand the group of people who park.  And they also know that we don’t have to make any decisions about how we’re going to do that until early next year.  So we’re setting aside any major energy about the challenge. The time between now and then will be spent listening to our parking crew and letting ideas and opportunities mature in our minds.  We’re learning that it’s better use of our time and energy to make plans and decisions at the right time… which often is not “right this minute”. 

Right now we’re gathering information; when it’s time, we will move forward, well-informed and ready to choose from among our opportunities.

If we take counsel of our fears, if we let the challenges overwhelm us, we will struggle.  But as our leaders take advantage of our many assets, you will see more and more evidence of the way we are moving calmly, confidently and faithfully into the future.

For never fear, God has a future for this congregation. 

Amen.

C 2025, Virginia H. Child

August 31, 2025  First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield MA

Luke 14:1, 7-14 — On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the Sabbath, they were watching him closely. . . ⁷ When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. ⁸ “When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host, ⁹ and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. ¹⁰ But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. ¹¹ For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” 

¹² He said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers and sisters or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. ¹³ But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. ¹⁴ And you will be blessed because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

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

I can just picture it.  Think of it as like going to one of those dinners at a church convention.  You stand outside in the hall, waiting for the doors to open, then when the doors open, everyone rushes in at once, heading for their favorite table….  Some of us gather in the back, filling the table with friends we’ve not seen for a year or more.  But some of us rush for the table closest to the speakers, because we want to be seen, because maybe the speaker will say “hi” and everyone will know we’re important.  It’s all show, no substance.

Now of course, not everyone who rushes for the front table is trying to show off – some of us can’t hear well, or can’t see so well.  Some of us are real friends of the speaker and want to offer their support to the speech. Some of us have heard that it’s best to fill up the room from the front to the back, and some of us are only following the crowd.  But, just as Jesus points out in the reading, some folks want everyone to know they’re important.  That’s success for them, to be known, recognized.

I think most of us like being known, being in a community, a place where everyone knows your name.  But making a success of our lives is about more than just having your name known, being recognized when you come to church.

This past week I had a great conversation with one of our members – and success was part of the conversation.  What does success look like?  How do we get there?  Our conversation was really about what success looks like for churches, but still the same question is part of the discussion – is success about being “seen” or something else.

It’s an important question for us just now.  As I’ve been saying this month, this is a key time for our church.  It’s clearer and clearer that we cannot continue as we have.  The world has changed, people have changed, times are changing.  The old, tried and true ways of keeping our church going just don’t work anymore.  

When our church was first gathered, in 1721, pretty much every resident in town had to attend the church, and the town had to support the church financially in order to be officially recognized as a town.  We were more than a hundred years old before that changed.  In 1833, the Congregational Church was disestablished, and we had to put together a new way of financing our work; we could no longer count on people coming because it was required.  Over the years, we’ve met change, large and small.  Today is no different.

Well, maybe it is, because in times past, we could always count on the respect of the community, we could count on our children learning basic things about Christian practice in school.  That’s different now.  

In particular, one of the struggles we are dealing with is the general public disdain for religion.  Last week, there was an article in the Boston Globe about the First Church UCC in Somerville.  Now Somerville is “student-heaven”; that church has something like 85% turnover in membership every year, because so many of their members are students at MIT or Harvard or one of the many other colleges in the area.  First Church has extra space in their building; there’s a problem housing the homeless in Somerville, and they’ve proposed turning their basement into a handicapped accessible homeless shelter.  As you can imagine, the neighbors aren’t happy.

The article’s pretty good, but it’s the letters to the editor that are illuminating – people don’t want the homeless anywhere near them.  In any argument you’re going to hear someone slam Joe Biden, and someone else slam Donald Trump.  And at least a quarter of the people accuse the church of something – misusing their land, misrepresenting their purpose, being vain…   And this particular story is pretty well received.  Time and again, when a story about churches or pastors is posted on news sites, people respond by calling believers names.  This is also part of our current reality. For us, this means we cannot assume that everyone outside our doors understands what we do, or wishes us well.

So, what might success look like for us?  Living and serving Jesus in a world where we can’t assume respect, or where we can expect people to come to church when they have kids…  what is success?

There are a billion books out there telling us how to succeed – well, I exaggerate, but not by all that much.  

Do you want to succeed, they say, well here’s how to do it.  Have this kind of music… no, that kind.  And for heaven’s sake, never never use the other kind.

Focus your service about the particular interests of the people you want to attract…. Don’t try to have a church that welcomes everyone.  Just promote what appeals – the most important thing is bringing people in, not being faithful to the Gospel.

But the thing is, all those are only really about attracting people, because they all depend on first naming what’s important for you, not getting clear about what matters to God.  If we just adopted ideas from a book, without regard to how they line up with our beliefs about what’s important, we’d be in trouble for sure.

And that gets us back to that convention dinner and sitting down front.  Here’s the truth for us.  First, we need to be clear about what we think following Jesus means for us and our church.  And then we need to work on how we live that out.

Being a success is not about putting on the glitz and sitting down front.  It’s about being faithful to your beliefs and doing whatever we do, to the best of our ability.  Because, we’re small, not dead.  And we can still do powerful things.

Here’s this week’s example:  for the past few weeks, we’ve been collected money to purchase teacher supplies for the teachers over at Brimfield Elementary. This grew out of our commitment to the children of our town.  The council decided that we could most effectively help our children by helping their teachers, and we’d all been struck by how much our teachers do, how much of their own time and money they put into educating our children.  So we asked the school what would be most appreciated and set a date to come over there with munchies and gifts.  We didn’t get fancy.  We did what worked with our source of money and people.  

On last Tuesday, Deb C, Deb G, Kitty and I took them two huge piles of Clorox wipes and Expo markers.  Yes, we took name brand stuff, because it matters, because we hoped it would say “you matter”.  And it succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.  The teacher’s lounge was packed – maybe 37 people all together – they loved the treats, but what really was amazing was their reaction to those wipes and expo markers.  They were astonishingly grateful.  We had great conversations with half a dozen people there, some of whom we knew before, and some were new.  Some of the people didn’t know where our church was, but they all do now.  And they know it’s a church with friendly people who care about them.  

That’s what success looks like.  We succeed when we live out our beliefs, when we show others respect and love, when we plan and execute events that fit with our resources – our building, our land, our peoples’ time and abilities.

Amen.

© 2025, Virginia H. Child

July 6, 2025 First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield MA

Ephesians 2:11-22 — So remember that once you were Gentiles by physical descent, who were called “uncircumcised” by Jews who are physically circumcised. ¹² At that time you were without Christ. You were aliens rather than citizens of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of God’s promise. In this world you had no hope and no God. ¹³ But now, thanks to Christ Jesus, you who once were so far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 

¹⁴ Christ is our peace. He made both Jews and Gentiles into one group. With his body, he broke down the barrier of hatred that divided us. ¹⁵ He canceled the detailed rules of the Law so that he could create one new person out of the two groups, making peace. ¹⁶ He reconciled them both as one body to God by the cross, which ended the hostility to God. 

¹⁷ When he came, he announced the good news of peace to you who were far away from God and to those who were near. ¹⁸ We both have access to the Father through Christ by the one Spirit. ¹⁹ So now you are no longer strangers and aliens. Rather, you are fellow citizens with God’s people, and you belong to God’s household. ²⁰ As God’s household, you are built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. ²¹ The whole building is joined together in him, and it grows up into a temple that is dedicated to the Lord. ²² Christ is building you into a place where God lives through the Spirit.

Luke 20:20-26 —  The legal experts and chief priests were watching Jesus closely and sent spies who pretended to be sincere. They wanted to trap him in his words so they could hand him over to the jurisdiction and authority of the governor. ²¹ They asked him, “Teacher, we know that you are correct in what you say and teach. You don’t show favoritism but teach God’s way as it really is. ²² Does the Law allow people to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” 

²³ Since Jesus recognized their deception, he said to them, ²⁴ “Show me a coin. Whose image and inscription does it have on it?” 

“Caesar’s,” they replied. 

²⁵ He said to them, “Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” ²⁶ They couldn’t trap him in his words in front of the people. Astonished by his answer, they were speechless.

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

On July 4, 1776, on one of those patented Philadelphia summer days (there’s just nothing like the combination of heat and humidity Philly has, perched between the Schuylkill and the Delaware Rivers) hot, stuffy, and world changing – on that day, the delegates of the Second Continental Congress adopted a Declaration of Independence.

It’s hard for us to really get how radical the delegates’ vision was, and still is.  Historian Heather Cox Richardson pointed out in her daily newsletter this week that “America was founded on the radical idea that all men were created equal”.  In their world, remember, everyone believed that God specially chose certain people to be kings, that God gave them certain inalienable (that is, unremovable) rights, that it was kings who could expect good things and everyone else existed to serve the king in a greater or lesser extent.

To this day, in England, when people join the Royal Navy, they swear an oath to the King, not to the country.  When we join the armed forces here in the US, you know, we swear to “support and defend the Constitution”.  We promise to obey the lawful orders of those appointed over us, but we do not swear to support and defend the President.  We have no kings here.

Our political ancestors were radicals, they were the woke leaders of their time, they began by issuing a powerful critique of the government they’d been taught that God had put over them.  Here’s some what they claimed:

• The king has interfered with the duties of our governors and kept them from approving needed laws
• The king has made is more and more difficult to participate in government
• The king has tried to keep people from emigrating to the colonies, trying to keep them from becoming citizens.
• The king has obstructed justice.
• The king has made the judges dependent on his will alone.
• The king has kept troops among us.
• The king has destroyed trade with the world.
• The king has deprived us of trial by jury.
• The king has incited rebellion among us.

The full list is sobering, and so is the realization that what they’re claiming is that no king has the right to exert their will on the people without their consent.

Our ancestors believed, taught, lived and died for the principle that power rises up from the people, from the governed, to the leaders.  They taught, and we believe, that rulers only have the power we give them. 

From time to time we hear claims that the United States was founded to be an expressly Christian land.  That is so not true.  Those political ancestors of ours knew exactly what a Christian country would look like.  Most of them had come from lands that had an established Christian church of one variety or another – Episcopalian in England, Roman Catholic in France and Spain.  In England, for instance, you could not attend university if you were a Quaker

And most of the colonies had established churches  We had colonies where you could not be Roman Catholic, or not be Baptist, or Quaker, or whatever, but only whatever the establishment was… or you might be imprisoned, exiled, or pay double taxes.  Our ancestors knew that there was no place in our world for one right way of being church and so the Bill of Rights makes it clear that we will not have an established church; 

But that does not mean that there aren’t Christian principles that are foundational to who we are as a country.  It doesn’t mean that those principles aren’t important.  They are; they are like the mortar that holds the brick wall together.

So, think about these two principles; and how we are or are not living them out today – because the 4^th of July is the best day to see where we are in living up to our principles.

First, we believe in that Christian idea that all people are equal.  You’ve heard the quote from Galatians 3:28:  “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”  That idea, that all people are essentially equal before God, woke people up to the idea that in the same way, all people are essentially equal in the eyes of our government.

And second, we believe in the Christian principle that our government is not yet perfect.  The Constitution of the United States calls us to a “more perfect union” – and as it was still being approved, delegates were already working on what became known as the Bill of Rights – changes or explanations of principles to make it better.  

The Fourth of July is a wonderful celebration of a great experiment – whether a nation could be founded and sustain itself on the principles that all people are essentially equal and that we can acknowledge the ways in which we fall short of our own expectations.

It’s the role of the church to continually remind us of what those expectations are, of how we live out that commitment to essential equality.

In Isaiah 10, as reported in the Common English Bible translation, the prophet Isaiah wrote:

10 Doom to those  who pronounce wicked decrees,  and keep writing harmful laws  ² to deprive the needy of their rights  and to rob the poor among my people of justice;  to make widows their loot;  to steal from orphans!  ³ What will you do on the day of punishment when disaster comes from far away? 

To whom will you flee for help;  where will you stash your wealth? ⁴ How will you avoid crouching among the prisoners and falling among the slain? Even so, God’s anger hasn’t turned away; God’s hand is still extended.

As Christians, it is our duty to ask what’s going on when we see laws being passed that will harm people,  It’s our duty to bring our concerns to the attention of our representatives and senators. It’s our duty to stand with those who will be hungry, who will lose access to health care, to stand with the families of those who will die in the time to come, because laws have been passed which privilege those who have buckets of money over those who have nothing.

As Christians, it is our duty to ask what’s going on when we see people, brown-skinned people but not white-skinned people, being dragged off the streets by law enforcement people whose actions are intended to intimidate and terrify.  

As Christians, it is our duty to ask what’s going on when we see government officials joking that detained immigrants will be housed in tents in tropical Florida, in danger of their lives because the alligators are waiting to eat them.  Even if detention is necessary, there is no excuse for inhumane housing or heavy-handed, vile jokes.

In Revolutionary days, one of the roles of the church was to offer radical critique of the way the King was governing (or not governing) us.  Our church predecessors asked questions of the authorities:  where is justice in this action?  

In the Mexican War, we once again took on the role of questioner:  just why were we inciting a war with Mexico?  When it became clear that the expansion of slave territories was a primary reason for the war, we protested the immorality of that war.

And our essential belief in the equality of all humans drove us inevitably to understand that slavery is incompatible with Christian belief.  Most of us weren’t there at the founding of the US, but we got there, first struggling politically, then fighting a war…. And over the years, those of us with power grew to understand more and more clearly that when we teach that Jesus makes all people equal, he means all people, not just the ones who look like us.

Over and over and over, it has been the role of the Church to weigh the actions of our government against our understanding of the basic principles on which we stand.  It is our work to call our governments to our “better angels”, to live out those principles for which our political ancestors fought and died.

As we have begun, let us continue to be faithful Christians who love our country and call it to be its best self.

Amen.

© 2025, Virginia H. Child