Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ reproduces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for March 31st:  Leviticus 23:26-41; Psalm 53; and Revelation 19:1-8.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

The month of March ends today.  It’s easy to lose track of the dates.  Not so much the farmers among us, but most of us are mainly isolated from the seasons.  We stay warm in winter, cool in summer.  Lights brighten the longer nights.  We can lose track of where we are.  It was different in ancient Israel.  Their religious feasts were linked to the seasons. 

The Day of Atonement fell on the tenth day of the seventh month.  On this day, all work ceased.  The people were ordered to practice self-denial for 24 hours.  To break this commitment meant exclusion from the community, which was tantamount to death.  The purpose of this religious observance was “to make atonement on your behalf before the Lord your God.”  Atonement is to seek forgiveness for the sins that offended God in order to repair the breach in the religious covenant. 

Five days later, after the people had atoned, they gathered for a week’s celebration.  They held a festival in Yahweh’s presence.  They celebrated the harvest and the promise God made through the order of nature to provide for God’s people. 

One of the truly inspiring aspects of these Jewish rituals is that God is not cordoned off in specifically “religious” rooms.  God is obviously present on the Day of Atonement, the day the faithful seek God’s forgiveness.  But God is equally present in the harvest festival, the Festival of Booths.  The booths were the shelters in the fields that the people stayed in as they worked the long hours of the harvest.  God was acknowledged in these rooms, as well.  God and faith lived together through every season, every day, every act.  Religion was not relegated to the typically religious.  It weaved itself into the rhythms of life.

The lesson offered to us is that there are to be times devoted specifically to “religious” purpose, but God is also to be seen and acknowledged in the ordinary.  The judgment against ignoring God in the ordinary is told to us graphically in the Revelation selection.  Revelation 18 tells us of the symbolic city of Babylon, “the whore” we read about today in chapter 19.  Babylon was a long past empire at the time of Revelation.  Babylon stands in for the city of Rome and its empire, and subsequently Rome stands in for any power that corrupts the earth.  Read chapter 18 to see what is condemned.  Babylon is a source of riches for merchants since she revels in luxuries and excesses.  This is why others are deprived of bare necessities so that they rejoice and shout “Hallelujah” upon Babylon’s destruction.  Babylon forgot that God abides among the ordinary aspects of life, that God is present not only during the “religious” observances, but that God watches what Babylon does in the ordinary. 

The specifically religious moments of our relationship with God, times such as church worship, are absolutely essential.  However, those moments are to propel us into right-living, into righteousness, in our ordinary lives.  There is no separation in the eyes of God.  May we learn from our Jewish ancestors, and may we appreciate the traditions that they continue to observe and be inspired by today, so that we practice on Monday what we preach on Sunday.

If you would like to join us for our online Bible study, please send an email to [email protected] for the Zoom logins.
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If you’d like, here is the link to the Southern New England Conference’s daily reading schedule:  www.sneucc.org/lectionary.

Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ reproduces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for March 29th:  Exodus 32:7-14; Psalm 32; and Luke 15:1-10.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

Jesus says something so unexpected in the parable of the 100 sheep that we try to ignore it.  A shepherd has lost one of the sheep of the flock.  His reaction is illogical.  He leaves the 99.  At this point in the story, we add in our own detail.  We assume it must be what the story implies because otherwise it’s just absurd to our minds.  We imagine to ourselves that the 99 are left safely corralled, thus allowing the shepherd to go off and search for the one.  This is not what the Bible says.  Jesus’ rhetorical question is quite clear.  He asks those around Him that if they were in the shepherd’s shoes, which one of you “‘does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness’”?

I’m no shepherd.  I can now say I actually know one, but I’m no shepherd myself.  I would imagine that if you leave 99 sheep unprotected in the open wilderness, then you are going to have a much larger problem than one lost sheep.  All 99 are now in jeopardy because they are left untended in the wilderness.  I’m no shepherd, and I only know one shepherd, but I’m pretty sure this is a recipe for disaster.  When Jesus asks His rhetorical question to people who are shepherds or who at least probably know shepherds, I would not be surprised if everyone in the crowd answered, “Jesus, no one leaves the 99 in the wilderness!”

I’ve told this story in connection with this parable before so if you’ve heard it my apologies.  My parents used to do a gigantic puzzle each summer.  They would leave it on the back porch and work on it in the evening if they felt so inclined, and then at the end of the summer they would frame the completed picture.  One year I was visiting and I stole one piece of the puzzle.  Eventually my parents finished the puzzle, except for that one piece.  When I showed up and put the one, last piece in place, well, they were none too happy.  I’m sure they must have looked high and low for that one lost piece.  However many pieces they had put together didn’t matter as long as the one piece was lost.  Without the one, the entire puzzle was a failed enterprise. 

Jesus’ parable is not about the one lost sheep.  It is not about the 99 sheep.  It is about the fullness of the 100 sheep.  It may not make practical sense to us, but Jesus is revealing that in His ministry, in the eyes of God, it is the whole that matters.  When the parable ends with “‘There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance,’” this should not lead to discussions about which is more important, the one of the 99.  The joy in heaven is about the restoration of wholeness.

In the deutero-Pauline Epistle to the Ephesians, we read, “With all wisdom and insight [God] has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” (1:8-10)  In theology this is called “recapitulation,” from the Greek word anacephalaeosis, meaning "summing up" or "summary."  In Christ, all of creation is to be eventually restored to its original wholeness.  God cannot abide the separation of any of God’s beloved creation, regardless of how small the percentage. 

This is a theology that makes sense out of the senselessness of the cross.  God loves us more than God loves God’s own self in Christ.  God is willing to even suffer and die on the cross “to gather up all things in him.”  This is not logical or practical, but it is of God, which sounds more important than logical or practical.

I invite you to join with us tomorrow as we gather in the presence of this loving God as the community at worship.  Add to our joy and to God’s by bringing us closer to wholeness.  And on Sunday we will hear the most famous of all these parables of the lost and of God’s ineffable love.  We gather at 9:30am.  If you would like to join online, email [email protected] for the Zoom link.

If you would like to join us for our online Bible study, please send an email to [email protected] for the Zoom logins.
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If you’d like, here is the link to the Southern New England Conference’s daily reading schedule:  www.sneucc.org/lectionary.

Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ reproduces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for March 28th:  Joshua 4:14-24; Psalm 32; and 2 Corinthians 5:6-15.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

The cross can be approached from many perspectives.  In general, those perspectives seem to fall into two main categories.  One is to emphasize forgiveness and the other rebirth. 

Jesus died to take away our sins.  I can imagine the earliest Christians struggling to explain the crucifixion.  It would not be long before they drew upon their Jewish heritage and saw Jesus’ cross as akin to a temple sacrifice offered to God.  From the earliest stories in Genesis, the faithful erected altars upon which to offer sacrifices to Yahweh.  These would be simple piles of stones.  Eventually, this would morph into the monumental architecture and religious establishment of the Jerusalem Temple.  As Jesus was crucified, the sacrifices to God continued atop Jerusalem’s hill.  Almost immediately, Christians linked the Temple’s worship to that of Jesus on the cross.  He became the perfect sin offering that appeased God’s judgment forever.  This is one way to look at the cross – from the perspective of our sinfulness and Christ’s forgiveness.

A second way to process the mystery of Golgotha is to look at it from the perspective Paul offers in today’s reading.  Rather than emphasizing the negative of sin, it is edifying to instead use the cross as inspiration to imitate Jesus’ life.  The cross in this way is not about death.  The cross becomes the final and most powerful statement of Jesus’ life.  The cross becomes the closing punctuation of an exclamation point to all that Jesus lived and preached about forgiveness, love, empathy, generosity and peacefulness.  Jesus would not betray His nature and His gospel even to save His life.  He goes to the cross because He will not deny or even shy away from the truth that He lived.  The cross in this way does not emphasize our sinfulness that needs to be atoned by God accepting Jesus’ death in place of our own.  The cross is rather the perfect testimony to God’s love as lived to the very last agonizing moment in Christ Jesus, and the salvation that it offers by almost compelling us to live like Jesus.

When believers look upon the cross in this way, it should lead to renewal, or as Jesus explained early in John’s Gospel to Nicodemus to being born from above or born again.  It is a spiritual rebirth.  Or, as Paul writes today, “For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.”

It is “the love of Christ” manifest in His dying that “urges us on.”  It is not His death per se, which belongs to the first understanding.  It is Jesus’ love that is stronger than death, that will not retreat in front of death, so that “those who live might live no longer for themselves.”  Rather than self-centeredness the Christian is so inspired by Jesus’ lesson offered in the extreme that we have died to our old selves and risen to a new life in imitation of Jesus:  Jesus has died so that we might live.

On this Lenten Friday, may we spend some extra time in prayer, with Scripture, in a quiet awareness that allows God to whisper, so that we may think beyond what we think we know of the cross and what it means to us and for us, and dwell upon the possibilities of what it means to believe “that one has died for all; therefore all have died.”

If you would like to join us for our online Bible study, please send an email to [email protected] for the Zoom logins.
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If you’d like, here is the link to the Southern New England Conference’s daily reading schedule:  www.sneucc.org/lectionary.

Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ reproduces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for March 27th:  Joshua 4:1-13; Psalm 32; and 2 Corinthians 4:16 - 5:5.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

The Red Sox play their first game of the 2025 season today in Texas.  The past several years have not been banner ones for the organization.  Improvements have been made, but holes remain.  However, on Opening Day, hope springs eternal.  The Sox won it all in 2007, 2013 and 2018, but for as fun as they were, none can compare to 2004.  I was so angry when the Red Sox were down 3-0 against the Yankees in the American League Championship that I took down my Red Sox sign in the window facing the road.  Then they clawed their way back somehow and beat New York, and then almost as an afterthought they went on to sweep the Cardinals in the World Series.  That was a feeling that would be hard to replicate.

In our Bible study group, we recently completed our discussion of the Book of Joshua and are now reading from the Book of Judges.  It’s obvious that Joshua is a stylized telling of the conquest story while Judges offers a more nuanced, historical perspective.  You’re welcome to join us at our next meeting to hear more about this.  Joshua’s conquest of the Promised Land is organized, thorough and often miraculous.  Judges does not shy away from the messier aspects of Israel’s emergence.  In the more historical account, the emergence of the people of Israel and its devotion to Yahweh their God are a slow and often times fraught journey.  When it does come about, after reading the stories about how often it may have failed, there’s a feeling of amazement and even benediction.  It’s 2004 on steroids.

Onto this we add Paul’s analogy of “the earthly tent we live in.”  Paul speaks as one who has read Plato more than once.  Paul contrasts the afflictions and burdens we experience in this life with the “eternal weight of glory beyond all measure” we hope for in the next life.  Our sufferings are for a time, says Paul, but the promised glory is forever.  This hope is a powerful motivator.  As Paul begins today’s selection, he argues its purpose is “[s]o we do not lose heart.”  Paul tells all those who face trial and affliction that as people of faith “we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen.”  Paul rejoices in the resurrection promise that God will awaken us on the other side now “clothed with our heavenly dwelling.”  I wish I knew more about medicine so that I could close this paragraph with the next step up from “It’s 2004 on steroids.”  Since I don’t, let us realize that Paul and those first believers in Corinth suffered terribly for their faith, but that same faith gave them the hope in something far greater, and that hope gave them the ability to persevere.

There are many unpleasantries in the world today.  Many things that can shock a person of faith.  Sometimes we can only see the negative.  Paul’s example today is that there is always the positive to be seen, to be trusted, and to be used as a motivator to keep up the fight, to not give in, to work toward the victory of a better tomorrow.  There’s always hope on Opening Day, and there’s always hope every day when we believe and trust in Christ crucified and also Christ resurrected.

If you would like to join us for our online Bible study, please send an email to [email protected] for the Zoom logins.
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If you’d like, here is the link to the Southern New England Conference’s daily reading schedule:  www.sneucc.org/lectionary.

Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ reproduces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for March 26th:  Numbers 13:17-27; Psalm 39; and Luke 13:18-21.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

Today’s Gospel selection shares two similes that Jesus uses to explain “the kingdom of God.”  This phrase is going through a period of adjustment at present.  For one, there is the effort to resist referring to God with male terminology.  Male referents were the accepted designations of God in the biblical period because in the strict patriarchy of those eras male equaled superior.  As we move past this male dominated preference, however, speaking of God as male is actually a limitation rather than a language that honours all that God is. 

Additionally, God is not bound by the constraints of human definitions, and as Jesus says, “‘God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth,’” (John 4:24) which moves the discussion of God’s nature beyond the physical confines of gender.  But also, God is spirit not body so we who worship Him, sorry, we who worship God, must strive to worship God in spiritual terms rather than physical.
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King and kingdom are male oriented terms and for the above reasons should be reconsidered.

There is more though.  King is an outdated referent.  If it means anything at all to us today, it conjures images of a ceremonial position.  The king of England has castles, carriages and crowns, but no real authority.  King during the biblical period presupposed absolute authority.  I doubt many of us would emotionally or spiritually embrace either the idea of a ceremonial God or a dictator God so why accept God as king? 

Recently, at an Ecclesiastical Council, the one seeking Ordination emphasized Jesus’ statement in John 15:15:  “‘I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.’”  Jesus moves us beyond the fear of God and allows us to aspire to being co-workers with God, friends rather than servants.  And in the Greek the language is slave and master, which makes Jesus’ preference for friends that much more telling.  God remains dominant, but it is because we know and accept God’s way as our way, as friends rather than servants. [For similar reasons I refrain from using “children of God.”  “People of God” conveys much the same, but with the added degree of responsibility rather than only an eternal childish dependence.]

Some are replacing kingdom of God with kin-dom of God.  The former emphasizes the centrality of God in its expression; the latter chooses to move its emphasis away from God to those around God.  This is problematic.  It seems better to use the phrase “reign of God” to get past these several issues.

So the reign of God is like something that may seem small and feeble, but actually holds the power to grow and to change everything.  Jesus’ message is of possibility and hope.  The cross should have been the end of Jesus.  Instead, it turned into a new beginning.  There wasn’t a believing soul at Golgotha according to the oldest Gospel, but today hundreds of millions of people follow the crucified Saviour.  Never count out what is possible in the reign of God.

If you would like to join us for our online Bible study, please send an email to [email protected] for the Zoom logins.

If you’d like, here is the link to the Southern New England Conference’s daily reading schedule:  www.sneucc.org/lectionary.

Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ reproduces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for March 25th:  Psalm 39; Ezekiel 17:1-10; and Romans 2:12-16.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

The Ezekiel passage in isolation is unintelligible.  It is describing cryptically the realpolitik situation of the defeated nation of Judah.  The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar deported Jerusalem’s king Jehoiachin to Babylon and installed Zedekiah on the throne in Jerusalem.  Zedekiah held onto the hope of restoring national independence and so he attempted to play off the Egyptian empire against the Babylonian.  Zedekiah hoped that the Egyptians would be able to offer protection.  These efforts fail miserably and Nebuchadnezzar will return and utterly defeat the nation of Judah and demolish the city of Jerusalem, including its temple.  This tragedy marks the end of the Jewish nation-state and it will not be restored officially until 1948.  This is the meaning of Ezekiel’s parable when he writes:  “‘Will [the vine] not shrivel when the east wind blows?  It will wither on the soil where it was growing.’”

This may be a parable offered in a religious setting, but it is a story of naked earthly power.  It is the logic of might makes right.  It forces the will of the stronger upon the weaker.  It doesn’t seek to convince the weaker because it is not a relationship of allies, but of intimidation.  It is also inherently unstable.  When empires collapse, most others will celebrate new found freedom and opportunities.  Relationships based mainly on power last only as long as there is power.  Lose the power and the empire loses control because the ones subjugated were never allies.  The Nazis convinced themselves that their model would last a thousand years.  It never made a decade.  The Soviets subjugated Eastern Europe, but at their first opportunity those nations broke free.  Empire is not something that endures.  It rots from within because as Lord Acton noted in the 19th century, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Law in power-based nations is a tool of the powerful.  It is not intended to be about justice or rights.  It is simply another tool used to punish and subjugate the weak.  Laws are used when helpful and ignored when a hindrance.  Judges are praised for favourable decisions and threatened for anything less.  The diminishment of law and the courts so that they are only expected to sanction the rule of the powerful is a sure sign of national decay.  In such situations, legal and illegal cannot be equated with right and wrong, moral and immoral. 

This is why Paul makes the distinction that he does in today’s passage.  He separates sin and righteousness not on the basis of the presence or absence of the law.  Profoundly, morality is independent of the law.  To governments who control by power and who intimidate by laws, Paul offers this radical alternative of justice:  “For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but the doers of the law who will be justified.  When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves.  They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness.”  Conscience is supreme in this system of morality and justice because the laws cannot be trusted.    

I remember seeing Alexei Navalny held in a cage in a kangaroo courtroom in Russia while the judge presided over him.  Navalny was on the side of justice and right.  The judge and the system he perpetuated were on the side of injustice and tyranny.  When Putin had Navalny assassinated last February, Putin was on the right side of the law, but on the wrong side of morality.  Anyone with a conscience could see this.  Whenever the weak are toyed with by the powerful’s law, the law is unjust.  Whenever the powerful determine the law for their benefit, the law is unjust.  And Paul closes today’s passage, writing, “God, through Jesus Christ, will judge the secret thoughts of all.”  Those secret thoughts of conscience hold-up the unjustly convicted as righteous and condemn the manipulators of law as sinful.

Jesus was condemned by the powerful, by the state, by the state’s law enforcer and the state’s laws.  The righteousness of that convicted instigator who was hung upon the cross is now observed and followed some 2,000 years later, while that empire of power who convicted Him is consigned to history. 

Lent is our season to feed our conscience.  Our inner voice is ultimately the final voice of right and wrong.  Such authority must be nurtured.  So read the Bible, think about the Jesus of the Gospels, ponder the lessons of our crucified Saviour, and then live them “[f]or it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but the doers of the law who will be justified.” 

If you would like to join us for our online Bible study, please send an email to [email protected] for the Zoom logins.
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If you’d like, here is the link to the Southern New England Conference’s daily reading schedule:  www.sneucc.org/lectionary.

Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ reproduces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for March 24th:  Psalm 39; Jeremiah 11:1-17; and Romans 2:1-11.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

Jeremiah is one of the most compelling books in the Bible, at least in my opinion.  It’s hard not to be drawn into his personal story, to sympathize with the plight that his blessing of prophecy forced upon him.  In some ways, Jeremiah is the Jewish Cassandra of Troy.  Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy by the god Apollo, but when Cassandra spurned the god’s amourous  advances Apollo layered on the curse that her prophecies while true would never be believed.  We read today:  “And the Lord said to me: Proclaim all these words in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem.”  Jeremiah is forced to proclaim an unpleasant and unwanted revelation to his own people, a revelation they refused to believe, and he had to do it face to face with them on the streets of Jerusalem.  The prophet could not post it on social media.  Jeremiah had to face the people with his words of condemnation, and in turn face their anger or their terror. 

Today’s passage begins with:  “The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord …”  The next two paragraphs open with “And the Lord said to me …”  Jeremiah is charged with the dangerous, thankless task of warning the people of Jerusalem that their fate is sealed, that defeat and destruction are certain because they are ordained by God.  Take hope away from a beleaguered people and they’ve lost before they’ve actually lost.  This is why Jeremiah was treated as a dangerous traitor by the rulers of his own people.  Now Jeremiah loved his neighbours, but was compelled to preach their coming devastation.  Can you imagine the pangs of conscience and the distress of soul this must have forced upon him?  His people rejected his prophecy and because of his prophecy rejected him as well.  Jeremiah remained faithful to his vocation, but at the loss of everything else.  What kind of test of faith must this have been? 

Add onto this the opening of the last paragraph:  “As for you [Jeremiah], do not pray for this people, or lift up a cry or prayer on their behalf, for I will not listen when they call to me in the time of their trouble.”  Not only did Jeremiah have to preach coming destruction, he was unable to pray for the people about to be destroyed.  Jeremiah had to process the fact that God would not listen to their pleas or to his.

Jump more than 500 years into the future and in Jesus Christ this is reversed.  In Jesus God enters the world to proclaim face to face the unconditional love of God.  Where once God was unforgiving, in Jesus’ cross God forgives all.  Where once the prophet was sentenced to isolation and despair, now Jesus yells from the cross, “‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’”  The punishment meted out by God in the Book of Jeremiah is now the punishment accepted by God in Christ.  To return to the old format of an angry, unforgiving God after all that Jesus endured seems downright wasteful to me.  And as the Romans passage begs, may we refrain from that old trope of judgment of others because God has said something radically new in Christ.  May we struggle with what it means and how to live into it this Lent. 

If you would like to join us for our online Bible study, please send an email to [email protected] for the Zoom logins.
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If you’d like, here is the link to the Southern New England Conference’s daily reading schedule:  www.sneucc.org/lectionary.