UCC Files



June 5, 2016

Third Sunday after Pentecost

I Kings 17:8-16 (17-24)

Gorgeous Compassion

Elijah, like many an unlikely prophet, gets sent into the world by God’s uncompromising command – “Go.” And, in today’s scripture, Elijah gets the “go” word more than once. First he goes to be fed by ravens. Next, he’s sent to a poor foreign widow with a small boy. It’s in the widow’s home that Elijah is proclaimed a prophet.

It wasn’t what Elijah said to the widow of Zarephath that declared and affirmed his role as a prophet. It was what she said to him that did the trick. She said, “Now I know you are a man of God and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.” Of course she knew he was a holy man; after all, he was able to feed her and her boy in the middle of a famine. And then, miracle of miracles, when the boy dies Elijah brings him back to life. Her words confirmed his call as a prophet. It did not matter that Elijah had predicted the drought that encompassed the land. It did not matter that he spoke directly to the King. What mattered was how he behaved toward the weakest and most vulnerable – a foreign widow with a fatherless child. In him God’s compassion and best hope for the world entered that woman’s home.

What would the most vulnerable in our world say about our ministry? Would they say that we were a people of God and our word was true? These are times when the numbers of the poor and homeless in our communities are increasing. Churches are the places where hope and compassion can be as simple as a sandwich or a cup of coffee or an invitation to worship. Congregations as diverse as Pennsburg United Church of Christ in rural Pennsylvania, and First Church in downtown Cambridge, Massachusetts have opened their doors and created in their space a place for a free simple meal and conversation. One is called a “Community Meal” and the other is called a “Friday Café,” but it is around such tables and hospitality that God’s great compassion and hope for us can be glimpsed. How we share that hope with our communities and each other is the bedrock of our faith and the test of our truth as a people of God.

Will our congregations be places where love is visible? Where the care we show each other is as tangible as a bowl of soup? Where our love is visiblein our willingness to open our doors to the weakest and most vulnerable in our communities?

June 12, 2016

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

I Kings 21:1-10 (11-14) 15-21a

Choose Justice

What a terrible tale the Bible tells us today. It has a weak King (Ahab), who wants what isn’t his, and an evil Queen (Jezebel) who murders a man to satisfy Ahab’s greed. Elijah, that great troubler of Ahab and prophet of Israel, calls Ahab out, and accuses him of evil. Elijah, Ahab and Jezebel could be characters on a fantasy TV show about ancient Kings, evil Queens and scraggly prophets. In this episode we’d see a tale of a prophet speaking a word of justice to the unjust.

We know how the prophets of Israel behaved. They marched right up to the rulers, knocked on the castle door and spoke their truth. Our denomination believes that God has called us to be a prophetic church. That means we believe in knocking on the doors of power and speaking a word of truth in order to liberate the oppressed, care for the poor and comfort the afflicted.

When the actions of the powerful hurt our communities and use resources in ways that put lives in peril and causes permanent damage to children, then the voice of a prophet is urgently needed. Such was the need in Flint, Michigan, in the ongoing water crisis there. And such was the response by Woodside Church, a shared ministry of the United Church of Christ and the American Baptist Churches. Under the leadership of Rev. Deborah Conrad, Woodside has been partnering with other UCC congregations, the UCC Michigan Conference, and the Disciples of Christ to find ways to distribute water, offer filters and find solutions to the vast amount of plastic from water bottles the residents now have to discard.

But the current danger and devastation that has visited one of our great cities is not simply another place for charity. It is a a key episode in this storied work we share for justice. Like Elijah and all the prophets, let’s knock on the doors of the powerful and claim God’s word as a word of hope for all people.

This crisis in our heartland exposed more than decrepit lead-filled pipes. It also exposed the devastating truth that in our country today, a poor and predominately African-American community can be disenfranchised by its own government. The suffering of Flint is more than a water issue, and the United Church of Christ is there knocking on the palace doors.

June 19, 2016

Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

I Kings 19: 1-4 (5-7) 8-15a

God is still speaking!

God is still speaking! God is a god of thunder and wind and rain. But we also know that God speaks in a still small voice whenever and wherever hearts are open and there is a cry for justice. That experience of a still speaking God, addressed by our denomination’s identity materials, has given the United Church of Christ an unusual brand: the comma! Of course, that comes from the Gracie Allen quote, “Never place a period where God has placed a comma.”

Since the UCC embarked on this campaign in 2004, people have worn comma lapel pins and clergy have had commas embroidered on their stoles. Some people even have commas tattooed permanently and temporarily on their bodies. There are churches with comma banners out front and in their sanctuaries. Comma T-Shirts, mugs, key chains and more are everywhere at UCC gatherings. There’s even a church in North Carolina that calls itself the “Comma Church” – Trinity United Church of Christ, in Concord.

The good news is we are not uni-punctuational. Just as Elijah experienced God in a new voice on that mountaintop, there is more than one punctuation mark that might express how we feel about this still speaking God.

The question mark is always a faithful witness to every question we ask from the heart in our seeking and wondering. We express joy and emphasis with exclamation points, and parentheses embrace us, not as an afterthought, but as an included part of the story. There’s the greater than mark (›), which calls us all into communities that make us part of something larger than ourselves.

We are the way we communicate; we are how we express our best thoughts and hopes as the church of Jesus Christ. We are Christians looking ahead to new century unfolding before us.

In this new century, God will have more surprises, more punctuation and more evidence of the genuine promise and hope that the Gospel offers all of us. There is no definitive period after hope. It is always an expression of what is yet to be, even if seen in a glass darkly. We’re not just commas anymore.

June 26

Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14

Pick Up the Mantle

Tradition is a word that gets bandied about a lot in our local churches. We consider the sacramental rites and rituals, the expressions of creedal history, and the familiar stories from the Bible as deep traditions of our church. There are also the long-beloved words of the old hymns our grandparents sang, and there’s the embroidered seat cushions in the chancel that were made by the women’s 1920 Sunday School class called the “The Rosebuds.” No matter what they are, these things connect us with our past.

Yet, it’s always a balancing act to understand which things to carry with us into the future to help us create a new day and a new history, and which things we need to let go of. It’s like moving or downsizing. Which of the 35 photos of our first pet will we keep and which will we discard? For communities like congregations, it’s good to be mindful that our current members will one day be memories, and the young will bring traditions of their own to the scrapbook of any congregation.

Elisha did not want his master, his mentor and friend, to leave. Every place they stopped, on this final tour of Israel, he was warned that Elijah was moving on, and Elisha resolved again and again that he would not leave Elijah’s side. Finally, of course, it comes time for Elijah to leave, and Elisha will get a share of his Spirit and pick up his mantle, becoming a prophet like Elijah. What pieces of our past, of those people, and rituals and pieces of furniture or pictures on the wall will we carry with us into the future? What is the spirit of the past that we need and how will we wear the mantle of tradition?

Many churches offer two services on Sunday mornings—often labelled “traditional” and “contemporary.” St. John’s UCC in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, explains on its website the differences between their two services. Both explanations contain the word “genuine.” Worship is worship, whether traditional or contemporary, when it is “genuine.” Wherever we are on life’s journey, whether we are upholding what has gone before or pressing innovation, let it reflect where we really are and express our genuine selves.

July 3, 2016

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

2 Kings 5: 1-14

Liberty

As we get ready to celebrate our Declaration of Independence, we are reminded that many of our United Church of Christ congregations have a deep history going back to our Colonial days and the Revolutionary War. Old South Church in Boston is where Benjamin Franklin was baptized; St. Paul’s in Millbach, Pennsylvania, like many UCC churches, has Revolutionary War veterans buried in its cemetery.

During those years, ministers were known to take sides in the battle for independence. Pastor David Rowland was forced to flee his pulpit in Providence, Rhode Island because of his sermons on freedom and taxation. He landed at First Church in Windsor, Connecticut, one of the oldest Congregational churches in the country. When the British Army occupied Philadelphia in 1777 they used the Old First Reformed Church in Philadelphia (now Old First Reformed UCC) as a hospital and a stable. Their German pastor was imprisoned by the British for preaching in German about independence for the colonies to the Hessian soldiers.

As the British army advanced toward Philadelphia in 1777, patriots carefully removed the large bells of the city’s churches, especially the “Liberty Bell,” which was famous even then. If the bells had been left behind the British would have melted them down for munitions. A farmer with a wagonload of hay unloaded the Liberty Bell, and ten other bells, to a place under the floorboards of Zion Reformed Church (now Zion Reformed United Church of Christ) in Allentown. There, the Liberty Bell was hidden safely until the British were driven from Philadelphia. Zion was also used as a hospital for Washington’s army.

The story of how we became the United States cannot be told without our churches.

Dear God, May our churches always be willing to express love for the world through courage and the willingness to be visible advocates for freedom and healing. Amen.

July 10, 2016

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

Luke 10:25-37

Caring Neighbors

The “Good Samaritan” would have been a startling idea to the people who came to hear Jesus. In those days, Samaritans were not considered “good.” They practiced a variation of Judaism that first century Jews disapproved of. One year, before Jesus was born, or so the story goes, a band of Samaritans broke into the temple and strew human bones around the altar, rendering the sanctuary temporarily unusable. Indeed, people felt as strongly about Samaritans then as some people, today, might feel about Muslims, or refugees.

But, as Jesus unravels for his audience, those we consider neighborly or “good” can sometimes surprise us. In this parable, the one who behaved with compassion for the man lying on the road was not a religious official but the Samaritan. With his usual folksy stroke, Jesus destroys categories of prejudice and projection and calls into question how we identify those we consider “our people.” The answer to the young man’s question, “Who is my neighbor?” was not as simple as he thought. For us today, we might ask if we can exclude from our application of the golden rule all those we categorize as “other.”

No one chooses to be a refugee. Some are children woken in the middle of the night by a parent clutching dragging them away from home and gun fire into the murky safety of a road clogged with other people fleeing. Some wait in terror for an opening and hide in a neighbor’s car trunk. Some just run over craggy mountains without food or shelter and have only what they are wearing. Everything they had, or were, is gone – left behind. Who would choose that path?

Who is our neighbor when faced with human suffering? The Syrian refugee crisis has been called a “tragedy of the century.” How will we respond? Who will be a good neighbor? Since the beginning of this unfolding horror, the United Church of Christ has worked to provide emergency assistance through our partners on the ground in the Middle East. More than six million Syrians have been displaced. The United States has agreed to take only 10,000 in 2016. Like the parable of the Good Samaritan, this is a story of human suffering. These people have been robbed and left for dead. Who will walk on by and who will stop to help?

July 17, 2016

Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

Luke 10:38-42

Word and Work

We know Martha and Mary. They are like us in so many ways. They love each other enough to want to work in concert, to keep house together, to welcome Jesus, the itinerant preacher, and serve him dinner. They’re also close enough to bicker–sisters and partners squabbling about whose doing too much and feeling put upon and arguing about the best way to be hospitable.

This story, in its day, was also about the roles people had in congregations. We know from the Book of Acts, chapter 6, that male disciples argued over which was more important work – serving community meals or studying the word of God. In the long history of the church universal, women have been included in the conversation about how the church should serve the world. However, it has only been recently that such service has included ordained ministry and other visible leadership roles.

For General Synod 2015, at the invitation of the UCC Historical Council, a group of women dressed as female figures from our UCC history and walked around the exhibit hall in Cleveland telling people about who they were and what they meant to our shared history. This living history demonstration was so popular that it has continued into an ongoing program called “UCC Roots,” a monthly email with a short story about a prominent UCC personage from our past.

Some of those featured in UCC Roots have been people like Mary Peake, a 19th century African American woman who secretly taught slaves to read, and Emma Newman, an early Congregational minister serving on the frontier. Also featured have beenCotton Mather, the Puritan preacher, and Robert V. Moss, president of the UCC from 1969-1976. (If you want to receive a monthly piece of UCC history you can subscribe at . Look for “Subscribe” on the home page.)

History offers more than glimpses of the powerful and visible; it also tells the stories of those like us, who sought ways they might serve the Gospel of Jesus Christ. One way to better understand who we are now is to get to know who we have been, and to remember that those who served the church before us were not always the ones in charge. Sometimes they were like Mary and Martha.

July 24, 2016

Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

Luke 11: 1-13

Shaped by Prayer

It would be hard to imagine a friend not coming to the door when you knock. Can you picture someone who cares about you not opening the door, even at four in the morning, and saying, “Yes? What do you need?” Well, at four in the morning, they might have a few choice words, but they would be there if you needed them. Jesus teaches prayer to his disciples as a kind of knocking on the door--as a kind of persistence, even a dogged, relentless pursuit. One of our UCC testimonies of faith says: We believe that the persistent search for God produces an authentic relationship with God engendering love, strengthening faith, dissolving guilt and giving life purpose and direction.

Anyone trying to achieve success in the business world knows that persistence is the key. In the arts world, you can be a brilliant painter or writer, but if you stop because you get discouraged or don’t sell your work immediately, then you will definitely never succeed. Persistence! Keep at it! Pray, then, not just because you are afraid, or in need . . . pray for nothing but the presence of God.

Brother Lawrence was a 17th century French Carmelite lay brother who wrote a small Christian classic called “The Practice of the Presence of God.” He worked in the kitchen and spent his time there attending to his practice of doing everything, even the most boring and menial and trivial task, as a prayer, as a gift. We who live in the 21stcentury can practice this kind of presence in our daily tasks. We might not be baking bread in a monastery kitchen but we can pray while on the bus, or bagging the groceries, or walking down the street.

O God, may our prayers be as persistent as gravity, as constant as a gentle spring rain, and as open as the sky over the plains. Teach us the spirit of attention and continuance. Teach us to hear the heart of grace in our resolve and focus. Lead us to pray without ceasing.

July 31, 2016

Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

Luke 12:13-21

Soul Investment

Security, says Jesus, isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. So you think if you make a zillion dollars and you put it in a vault somewhere that you will be secure, safe and able to live happily. If money is no longer a worry, you might think you’ll be able to relax. But such hoarded treasure cannot stop aging and death nor answer the mystery of when life will end or how long good health will be yours. Greed is more than acquisition. It’s what we count on as security, as the bedrock, the foundation, or ultimate value of our lives. And, says Jesus, be wary of storing up treasure for your self. Be rich toward God, he says.

Be rich toward God? What does God need or want that money could buy? How are we to be rich toward God? Perhaps these are some ways . . .

To be rich toward God we might:

• Remember to whom the world belongs

• Remember that life is like a cloud – full of appearance and impermanence

•

• Open our eyes to see the world as God does–and open our arms

• Open our hearts to the beauty of human faces

• Embrace a world of rich diversity

• • Live as if the Realm of God is here, now

• Love others to distraction

• Pray constantly and practice the presence of God

• Forgive often

• Share our resources

• Really reject racism and get to know someone who isn’t like us

• Speak up in support of the powerless

• Love this creation and love your life

• Add at least ten more things to this list!

August 7, 2016

Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16

Living Into the Promise

Can you imagine leaving everything you have ever known behind, opening your front door and with only what you can carry heading down whatever road is front of you? Can you fathom heading to some unknown place at some unknown time just on faith alone? Would you take your family on such a journey? Would you take your wife and your children and put them in tents in a desert in a foreign land? Would you do that for faith?

Refugees around the world live the life of Abraham and Sarah. They live in the open, in tents, without resources and standing on promises–millions of them. It’s a crisis that does not go away, and it’s more than Syria. Church World Service is a key national and international actor in refugee resettlement, and the UCC is working with them. Ariel Royer, a UCC Global Ministries intern, coordinated a database of local congregations who are now or have in the past hosted, welcomed or supported refugees. With the database completed, our national UCC offices will be able to make connections and foster relationships among agencies and congregations to share best practices.

The United Church of Christ works every day with nternational organizations and the Disciples of Christ to respond to the needs of those living in the open, living not as citizens of a world in the 21st century but like ancient patriarchs from biblical times. We scramble for food and support and shelter and countries and congregations that will open their arms.

Everyone who has ever taken a leap into an unwritten future is on the same journey as Abraham and Sarah, and, if you think about it, that’s really all of us. No one knows what tomorrow will be. Life changes on a dime…in a twinkling. In spite of our best efforts to predict and control tomorrow, what will come next for us is a mystery. We are, each of us, held in the hands of one who was with us before time began. An awareness of how fragile life is and how much we share in its mystery and impermanence might compel all of us to remember the world’s refugees every day.

August 14, 2016

Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Psalm 80:1-2, 8-19

The Vineyard

Vineyards are beautiful. Grapes cultivated and grown for agriculture spread their orderly lines across valleys and along hillsides near many of our churches in California, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, Michigan, Oregon and more. To grow the best grapes requires careful work, pruning to keep the strongest vines running on top and getting the right amount of sun, just the right depth of water and careful fertilizing. Farmers always have to work with nature . . . keeping track of temperature, and rain and the pesky birds that want to pick the grapes just before they ripen. It’s no small feat to care for grapevines.

Vineyards in the Bible often symbolize Israel, or the nations of the world. God plants the vines and the vineyard is watched to see if it will flourish or fail. And we, the workers in the vineyard, are given the care of this field of plants. The vines participate in the earth, air and water system that makes plants grow, but they also need our care because without it they will grow wild and the grapes will be bitter. It’s a great metaphor, this field of grapes, for how we co-create, how we work with God to make the world into a place that is producing either baskets of sweet abundance or bitter fruit that shrivels easily and is lost to crows.

In Psalm 80, the Psalmist accuses God of having forgotten the vine brought out of Egypt. The vineyard in the Psalm has been burned and ravaged by wild boars. Its walls and fences were left to ruin so that the grapes were lost to everyone walking by. This Psalm is a prayer for help and forgiveness, for hope and restoration. It was written by someone who felt abandoned, asking for life so that they will never turn back again.

If we were to ask for life for our nation, what might be included in that prayer? Soon we will elect a new president. There is deep feeling and a growing awareness that as a country, we have work to do. How could God, who plants the nations of the world, help us right now? What might be the substance of our prayers and best hopes as we think about our country’s future?

August 21, 2016

Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Luke 13:10-17

Sabbath

Reading the Bible from our vantage point and with our awareness of modern medicine, we recoil at the idea that anyone would think it was God’s wish that someone be in pain one extra day rather than be cured–even if it was the Sabbath. Time and again, Jesus shows the weakness of the fundamentalist mindset when it comes to God’s day off. The Sabbath, as Jesus says elsewhere, is a gift to humankind and not a test of will.

In an old Jewish folk tale, a rabbi and his son are on a quest when they come across an ancient and beautiful woman sitting in the midst of the garden of paradise. She is the Sarah, Abraham’s wife, and she has a pile of colored leaves at her feet. Next to it is a beautiful basket. Every few minutes she bends and takes some of the leaves and crushes them into a powder and puts it in her basket. She explains that she is going to fill the basket with the crushed leaves of paradise and throw that powder to the four winds. The winds will carry it to all Jews so they might smell the air of paradise and feel its peace if just for a moment as the Sabbath evening is ushered in. The rabbi and his son remark on how they have felt a sense of that peace on the Sabbath.

The image in today’s scripture of a woman being freed from the bondage of being bent over and unable to stand up straightprovides aremarkable sense of what kind of freedom having a real Sabbath might give.  Along with the story of Sarah and the leaves, we are given a beautiful image of the Sabbath: setting aside a time that has elements of paradise and freedom, yet bounded by the injunction not to work. In addition, the Sabbath is a time when people do not use more resources than they need and share a meal in harmony with those they love. The Sabbath, thought of that way, becomes not only a day of rest but a day of love and beauty and the practice of living justly.

There is much talk in our Pastoral Excellence program about encouraging our UCC clergy to be mindful of taking time off.  Perhaps we need a lay excellence program that would call all of us to make time to be with our families in a holy rest.

August 28, 2016

Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Luke 14: 1, 7-14

Open Table

In much of the United Church of Christ, we practice an “open table.” That is, our sacrament of Holy Communion is not limited to church members or those baptized by us.  We welcome all baptized persons to share the bread and the cup.  As a denomination, our Table of the Lord’s Supper is open to all.

Jesus, of course, as is his way, broadens that welcome.  It’s not just that we are to make a place for everyone who comes to us but, he says, we must go out and invite everyone else, especially those who might not otherwise be invited.  Jesus names the poor, the lame and the blind as prime invitees.  It’s all about outreach to the weakest and the most unwelcome.  And he means serious outreach.  He means outreach that knocks on the doors of strangers and grabs them wherever they are. It’s a radical, extravagant, over-the-top, way beyond the norm kind of outreach. It means going to places where people are and not just mailing them an invitation.

In the United Church of Christ there are more than 1,200 churches that call themselves “Open and Affirming.” Since 1985, when the General Synod adopted its first resolution on the subject, we have been a denomination that has provided churches with the encouragement and resources to welcome lesbian, gay and bisexual people into our congregations and leadership. As we have added transgendered people to that list, our welcome has grown bigger and wider and more remarkable.

We are a denomination that has tried to follow the call of Jesus to reach into the world and invite those who have been named unacceptable or unwelcome or outcast. Around the table of our extravagant welcome is where many of us have discovered who we are as a people of God and disciples of Jesus Christ. We are the people who will stop at nothing to invite you to our party. We will seek you out, no matter who you are, and wherever you are on life’s journey; we will chase after you and make sure you understand that you are welcome here.

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