“May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” (Ps 19:14)

Distractions are a welcome relief from all of the bad news of a raging pandemic.  

Tom Brady was another distraction when he revealed on Tuesday that he was leaving the Patriots. Even with all that is going on, when this news hit, it found its way to the top of my Boston Globe news feed.  I’m not a big football fan, but even for me it was a welcome distraction.

Brady deserves the honour of GOAT – Greatest Of All Time.  He helped transform a lackluster team into a six-time Super Bowl championship team. 

On the other side of the coin, when someone commits a crime and then ends-up going to jail, we can say they deserve it.  What they chose to do was intentional and it had consequences. 

But when we speak about accidents or diseases, the word deserve is completely out of place.  Someone walks away from a car accident and another dies.  This has nothing to do with one deserving to live and another deserving to die.  Accidents don’t work like this. 

Someone gets the Corona Virus and someone else doesn’t.  One doesn’t deserve to be sick and another deserves to be healthy.  Disease doesn’t work like this either. 

But too often that word deserve gets thrown into the conversation when it simply does not apply.  One of my most poignant moments as a pastor was when a grieving mother asked me at her son’s wake, “What did I do to deserve this?” 

She thought that somehow she had so offended God that He would take her son, that she deserved something this horrible.  Her faith, which should have been a comfort, made her feel worse.

Sadly, the way we talk about God can lead people of faith to think like this.  How common it is to pray with the words “almighty God.”  If God is almighty, some may then assume that God is in full control, all the time, of everything. 

If God is in full control, then we may imagine that there are no accidents.  Then, when an accident or disease does strike, we ask what did we do to deserve this? 

This can be so offensive that some people turn away from God.  If God truly were like this, I would not be a pastor. I would not even be a person of faith.  This would be a cruel and cold God, and one not worthy of my attention.  But this is not our God.

I think this is something we need to remember as we’re in the midst of a worldwide pandemic with very local consequences. 

Whatever happens we need to remember as Clint Eastwood’s character says at the end of the movie Unforgiven, “Deserve has nothing to do with it.”

The virus isn’t sent by God because someone deserves to get it.  Not washing your hands may have something to do with getting it, but God doesn’t.

And that’s exactly what Jesus tells us today in the Gospel. 

Jesus and His disciples encounter a man born blind.  The disciples, as people accustomed to talk of almighty God, assume that the man’s blindness is deserved in some way.  But he was born this way?  How could he deserve blindness sitting in his mother’s womb?

So the confused disciples turn to Jesus.  They ask Jesus, the rabbi, the teacher, “‘Who sinned, this man or his parents?’” 

Somehow this guy deserved to be born blind because everything must have a reason, they thought.  Nothing is accidental.  Nothing is by chance.  Deserve is universal.  But Jesus’ plain answer is basically, “Boys, that’s not that way God works.” 

Accidents happen, disease happens, and it doesn’t have anything to do with deserve.  They just happen.

That’s a hard lesson sometimes.  I think we may want God to be in full control so that we can maybe pray our way out of bad things, but bad things still happen to good people.  And that’s a hard lesson. 

But Jesus won’t leave it at that.  To put an exclamation point at the end of His teaching, Jesus goes through the actual, physical work of making mud and placing it on the man’s eyes.  Jesus could have healed him in so many ways, but Jesus goes out of His way to make work out of the miracle.

This is important because it is the Sabbath and according to God’s law no work may be done on the Sabbath.  This sets up a whole confrontation with the religious experts, and this lays out the path for Jesus to say that God is much more concerned about us than He is about rules, even what we call God’s rules.  Compassion trumps everything else when it comes to God.

So even though accidents and disease add random suffering in our lives, even though we can’t always pray our way out of them, Jesus wants to make sure that we know God cares, even when, especially when, bad things happen to good people, Jesus wants us to know that God cares. 

I think during Lent we might want to think about Jesus’ cross not so much as atonement for sins, but as God’s at-one-ment with us.  The cross is not about how bad we are, but about how much God cares for us especially in our darkest moments. 

This is the cross’ at-one-ment.  This is God’s ineffable compassion.

In this time of unusually widespread suffering, we can find comfort in Jesus’ at-one-ment and we can share it with others. 

We can check in on those who may need some extra help. 

We can be extra courteous everywhere.  The people at the grocery store are under a lot of pressure.  The people at the hospitals and doctors’ offices are out straight.

Many people don’t know about jobs or how they will pay bills.  Recession looms.  Parents wonder how they will care for children with schools closed for who knows how long. 

Let us go out of our way to be kind and patient with each other, and care about each other.

And may Jesus bless our world with healing.  May He guide the intelligent men and women who are working to find a vaccine.  May He protect the care-givers.  May He lead our leaders.  And may this pandemic pass so that we may return to the extraordinary blessings of the ordinary.  For these things we pray in Jesus’ name.  Amen. 

Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ produces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for Saturday, March 21st:  1 Samuel 15:32-34; Psalm 23; John 1:1-9.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

I hope you read today’s passages.  I did, then I was so confused I actually went to the Revised Common Lectionary site to see if the UCC’s site had made a typo.  They didn’t.  We are actually supposed to find inspiration in those two verses from 1 Samuel.  I didn’t – at least not literally.  Let me try and explain briefly, briefly not being one of my strengths.

There is a powerful movie that was produced by the BBC in 2008 called God on Trial.  The Jewish prisoners of a Nazi concentration camp put, well, God in trial.  I won’t give away the ending, but so much could be said about it.  One of the arguments in the trial, as these Jewish men were living the Holocaust, was the biblical story of Israel’s extermination of its enemies, one of which was the Amalekites.  What Israel had done was now being done to Israel.  Please don’t read this in any way, form or manner as Anti-Semitic.  It is a timeless message for all who would call themselves the People of God (cf. Romans 15:4; 2 Timothy 3:16-17).  Christians did and still do need to internalize the message that motivates this passage and this movie. 
 
The background to today’s passage is that King Saul is rejected by God because God had ordered the holocaust of the Amalekites and Saul wasn’t as thorough as God wanted.  He slaughtered everyone:  soldiers, men, women, aged, children.  He, however, withheld the captured spoil “to sacrifice to the Lord.”  And Saul also spared King Agag. 

God resented Saul’s gesture.  When the history of the Jewish nation ends, we read that their Babylonian conquerors treated the last Jewish king, Jehoiachin, with remarkable dignity and kindness. (2 Kings 25:27-30)  Compare this closing image which is equally inspired with God’s prophet Samuel ordering Agag to be brought to him.  Agag is terrified.  He walks toward the man of God “haltingly.”  The prophet not only slays the king, he cuts his body into pieces “before the Lord.”  And we are supposed to imagine that God is now pleased?

This is the reading that is supposed to inspire us this morning?  I can’t help but stand with Saul.  I am offended by Samuel’s righteous savagery.  I do not accept this as pleasing to God.  There is a distinction made by scholars between inspiration and revelation.  The biblical text is inspired, but not every literal word or literal example must be revealed.  This may well be an inspired message of following God wholeheartedly even when the reason is masked to us, but not a literal revelation that people of faith should act with such heartless zealotry.  We do not need any more religious terrorists.  And even in this manner, I find today’s passage far from inspiring.
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Maybe this is why the eternal Word, Jesus Christ, had to reveal God in our human flesh and blood.  Maybe Jesus’ incontrovertible life was necessary to reveal perfectly who God is.  Maybe Jesus’ death is the undeniable, unavoidable, unwanted revelation that God would rather die than allow His followers to imagine that something like Samuel’s savagery makes God smile.  No prophet foretold anything like God dying on the cross.  Jesus’ followers to the bitter end could not accept it.  It was only the reality of the cross that finally forced us to think that God is less judgmental and vindictive than we.  But has even the cross convinced the people of God?

Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ produces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for Friday, March 20th:  1 Samuel 15:22-31; Psalm 23; and Ephesians 5:1-9.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

30 years and two days ago the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston was robbed.  13 pieces of art were stolen that have never been recovered.  Three decades later this remains the largest-value art theft in history, worth a combined $500 million.  The case remains unsolved. 

This required a great deal of planning and expertise.  Someone somewhere must really love art to go to this extent to obtain it.  The pieces stolen, however, are so famous that they cannot be shown.  Whoever arranged for this robbery, whoever it is that loves art this much, cannot share it with anyone else, and that person has deprived everyone else of the chance to enjoy them.  Their empty frames on the wall are constant reminders of what has been lost.

A $10 million reward has been offered for information leading to the return of these masterpieces.  This kind of money can turn even the most trusted friend into a possible liability.  The stolen artwork cannot be enjoyed or shared.  It must be hidden. 

God has given us priceless gifts.  Even the most ordinary of them are now seen as extraordinary in these un-ordinary times of pandemic.  And there are also the gifts beyond the ordinary.  Paul writes famously in 1 Corinthians 13 that there are faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love.  

Faith is received from God and given back to God.  No matter the trials and uncertainties of this world, our faith is always in God.  This should not fluctuate based on current events.  Faith gives us continuity and stability no matter how scarce these are right now.

Hope is another virtue shared from above.  Regardless of how dire it may be at any given time, we are never bereft of hope.  Hope lets us see things differently and hope gives us the assurance of life after life.  Not even a pandemic can defy hope.

And love is what connects us with each other and with God.  Social distancing can’t separate the connections born of love.  1John says it so purely:  “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”

These are God’s masterpieces.  They are meant to be shared.  They diminish if like the masterpieces stolen 30 years and two days ago, they must sit locked away, hidden, unappreciated and unable to inspire.
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In times of isolation and darkness, today’s New Testament reading is especially meaningful.  We are called to be “imitators of God.”  What does this mean?  How about if we “Live as children of light – for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.”  These gifts given from God are not meant to be hoarded.  They must be lived.  In all that “is good and right and true,” we live in imitation of God.  The world needs these gifts to be shared as openly and widely as possible.  Let us live as Christians – especially now.

​Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ produces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for Thursday, March 19th:  1 Samuel 15:10-21; Psalm 23; and Ephesians 4:25-32.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

One of the members of our church shared a photo of a lone, purple crocus popping up through the dry grass around our church, a church snowed upon today.  It was a much appreciated sign of hope amidst all of the bad news born of the pandemic.  It is also apropos because today at 11:50pm it is Spring!  The Vernal Equinox.  One of two days each year when the sun shines for twelve hours at the equator, leaving equal amounts of day and night, thus Equinox, “equal night.”  This is a rather special Vernal Equinox too.  It hasn’t arrived this early on the calendar since 1896, 124 years ago.  I don’t know if it will make a difference, but I’m hoping that warmer and longer days may lessen the angst and isolation of this pandemic.

What I do know will help is what we do for one another.  This is the gist of what the Ephesians passage shares with us today.  Christians are expected to act for the good of the whole, for that is holy.  As it is written:  “For we are members of one another.”  The image of the body conveys our mutual interdependence.  When any member of the body suffers, the entire body suffers.  A microscopic virus finds its way into our body and before you know it the entire body is in distress.  In the same way, we are all interconnected, and as Christians we are all called upon to support the whole not only ourselves.

I read a newspaper report that ammunition sales are skyrocketing.  Some are worried that the pandemic will lead to social unrest.  Rather than appreciate the lesson of mutual support, there are some who think it wiser to fight it out.  If we turn on one another, then the virus will be a small part of a much greater affliction. 

Instead, let us as people of faith work together.  The best way to deal with this crisis is not to add on another layer of crisis.  It is to be there for each other – “For we are members of one another.”  A central Lenten theme is Jesus’ compassion.  He went to the cross rather than abandon in the slightest His gospel of love and peace.  He accepted the violence done to Him rather than choosing violence Himself.  He gave Himself as His final, perfect testimony that mutual compassion is our only road to salvation.

In un-ordinary times, we must pay unusual attention to keeping and practicing our faith.  When the normal routines don’t play out, our regular practice of the faith can’t play out normally either.  We have to be more proactive and aware.  We need to make the extra effort to think not only of ourselves, but of others.
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This is as much a sign of hope as is that lone crocus of Spring’s first day.

Hello all.
In these confusing and worrisome times, when the news seems to go from bad to worse, Ed M. shared a perfect picture of hope and resiliency outside our church building.
Thanks Ed for the pick-me-up.
Rev. Randy ​

Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ produces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for Wednesday, March 18th:  Psalm 81; Jeremiah 2:4-13; and John 7:14-31, 37-39.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

So Tom Brady parted ways with the New England Patriots yesterday after 20 years.  This is a timely distraction, but it also so trivial now that the pandemic fills our days.  Things that once seemed so important are no longer.  When compared to the ravages caused by an unseen, microscopic virus that is so primitive it can only live by hijacking the DNA of a host cell, Tom Brady or the NBA, or the NHL, or MLB are only distractions, multi-million dollar distractions, but distractions nonetheless.

And with time so too will this pandemic pass, as hard as that may be to imagine as we hunker-down in the midst of it.  Eventually, a vaccine will be developed to protect against COVID-19 and, hopefully, the Corona virus will become only as dangerous as the other flu viruses.  This does not lessen the seriousness and the danger of the pandemic, but it will pass.  In 1918, the Spanish flu rampaged throughout the world and its effects were in addition to the death and destruction inflicted by World War I.  If we weren’t in this current pandemic, would any of us remember the Spanish flu?

In today’s passage from the prophet Jeremiah, God reveals:  “My people have committed two evils:  they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.”  The first evil was to turn away from and ignore God.  The second evil was to try and replace God with an ersatz god of their own imagination.  

Israel, in the prophet’s poetic language, had rejected God’s “fountain of living water,” and instead had tried to replace it with an inferior and ineffective alternative of their own making.  Continuing in the poetic style, God provided water.  Israel’s alternative couldn’t even hold water.

I hear in this a message of God’s eternal consequence.  We, on the other hand, can become transfixed by the immediate and the temporary.  I can’t help but think that I’m on some sort of weird vacation right now.  I don’t have to go to meetings.  I shouldn’t make visitations.  I can’t even worship in church on a Sunday morning.  Yankee Candle is even closed (By the way, I give them a lot of credit.  They will continue to pay even their part-time workers during this closure.).  My days are defined by the pandemic, but hopefully this will pass.  But God is an ever-present constant in the world and in our lives.  Any attempt to replace God will inevitably lead to Jeremiah’s “cracked cisterns.”

We have time for a little extra reading.  Maybe look up Pascal’s Wager.  I choose to not emphasize the hereafter in my preaching because I know nothing of it, and I believe also that we need to see religion as a blessing here-and-now.  But Pascal looked at faith from the very practical perspective of a scientist.  I don’t agree with his wager, but there is something of merit in considering the eternal consequence of God as opposed to anything we may create as an alternative.

Maybe spend some time thinking about the words of Jesus in today’s Gospel passage: “‘Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own.  …  Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.’”
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Lent is a time to ponder our faith and social distancing has given us even more time.  Let’s try to come out of this time of solitude with a deeper appreciation for the eternal consequence of God.

Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ produces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for Tuesday, March 17th:  Genesis 29:1-14; Psalm 81: and 1 Corinthians 10:1-4.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

Today is usually a day of boisterous celebration.  It is St. Patty’s Day.  I have friends in the adult beverage business.  They have said that some of the bars in Holyoke can earn up to 80% of their annual sales in conjunction with this day.  Parades are held. Queens and courts are elected.  Green is ubiquitous.  Politicians hold breakfasts that are reported in the news.  But not this year.  This year we are practicing “social distancing.”  By local, state and federal decree, people are prevented from gathering in large groups, and bars and restaurants are ordered closed.  We are in the midst of the Corona Virus pandemic.

If there is any silver lining to this crisis, it is a renewed appreciation for community.  I am watching people come together to help each other.  I received an email from a young family yesterday asking how the young people could be of assistance during this time of school closure.  We are calling one another to make sure everything is all right.  The town is increasing wellness checks on seniors.  People are purchasing gift cards to local establishments to help them through this lull of business.  I think the political pendulum has begun to swing back to center.  I think we realize that government is not necessarily evil.  We are asking government to help with their expertise and financial assistance in ways that only the government can, and can only with our investment.

I hope and pray as well that this renewed appreciation for community extends to the church community.  I literally cannot remember the last Sunday that I did not go to church.  If I go away on vacation, I go to church.  Church is as much a part of Sunday as green is for St. Patty’s Day.  Then, a couple of days ago I had to stay at home on Sunday and lead worship from in front of my computer screen.  I would have loved to have led worship from our church building, but we have no internet connection there.  We are still church, and we are still worshiping, but boy do I miss the worshiping community and the sacredness of place.  Watching a sporting event without anyone in the seats is not the same.  That’s the way I feel about church.  The community makes such a difference.

I hope and pray that you feel something similar. 

And may I point out a remarkable line from the Psalmist?  God is not only admonishing His people for their disloyalty.  God almost groans out the anguished words: “O Israel, if you would but listen to me!”  God speaks, and no one cares to hear.  These are words of God’s isolation:  “If you would but listen to me!”  Ours is a God who is not distant and aloof, but one who cares about us so much and so desires to be a real part of our lives that Jesus came to us, and Jesus died for us.
If the silver lining of community extends to the community of the church, I hope it also extends to include a renewed and holy desire to be close to the God who desires to be close to us.  And in this time of unpredictable disruption, let us remember the words of today’s Psalm: “Sing aloud to God our strength.”  God is stronger than any crisis.  Turn to Him and listen.

Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ produces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for Monday, March 16th:  Genesis 24:1-27; Psalm 81; and 2 John 1-13.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

Did you read all of the suggested Bible passages for today?  If you did, then you only have to read 26 more New Testament books and you will have read the entire New Testament!  The 2 John passage for today is an entire New Testament book.  Raymond E. Brown was a world-renowned biblical scholar.  When the Roman Catholic Church held Vatican Council II in the 1960’s, Brown was one of the Pope’s hand-selected New Testament scholars.  He knew his stuff.

Brown has written extensively on the Johannine books in the Bible.  He opens a window into an ancient Christian community that did not survive, except for the beautiful writings that we find in the New Testament.  John’s was a community that was guided by the Paraclete, the Spirit.  It emphasized the authority of the Spirit’s charism, the Spirit’s power.  It avoided hierarchy.  You will not find even the word apostle or its derivatives anywhere in the texts. 

In the Gospel, there is but one good shepherd and that is Jesus Himself.  The Beloved Disciple is the epitome of Christian devotion.  Sadly, however, this church model did not survive the stress of time and the trials of leadership.  Brown points to the cracks in this church’s foundation by drawing an unbelievable amount of information out of such small books as 2 and 3 John.  

When we read today the advice of “the elder” to a sister church, the “elect lady and her children,” we overhear the warning that they should not “receive into the house or welcome anyone who comes to you and does not bring this teaching,” and “this teaching” will be described below.  There are others who are preaching Christ, but who are denying Jesus, and cracks form in the foundation.

The “deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh; any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist!”  The deceivers are so scandalized by Jesus’ suffering, crucifixion and death that they simply deny its reality.  They claim that the cross was nothing more than a divine hoax, that Jesus laughed invisibly through it all.  These deceivers eventually became docetists, from the Greek word to seem.  Jesus’ actual physical body, His actual human nature, only seemed to be real.  This was the only way that they could process the divinity of Jesus and the horrible spectacle that is crucifixion.
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This deception speaks in a convoluted way about the reality of what we ponder during Lent.  The reality of the cross was so stark, unexpected and unexplainable that many simply denied it, which in a weird sense is honest testimony to the cross’ reality and Jesus’ love.  Jesus did not “seem” to suffer through a prolonged dying.  He suffered.  He died.  And Jesus as the Son of God suffered and died for you and for me.  Let us never deceive ourselves about how much we are loved by this unique Saviour.  Let us use this Lenten season to grow closer to Him and to let Jesus know that we know and that we believe and that we are forever thankful.