Somewhere along the way, Christianity become professionalized. All too often these days we look to clergy to tell us all about God--most particularly, about where and how God is allowed to show up in our lives. And those "allowed appearances" have become more strictly filtered through the church: "A 'God moment" must look like this but never that, here but never there." But, really, God is everywhere-- even outside the church! even in you! even in the people you like the least!-- and you don'...
We're pivoting this Sunday to address what's shaped up to be a pretty stressful and painful week (in the midst of a stressful and painful season) for a lot of folks, what with the occupation of Washington, DC by federal law enforcement, a formal request to the Supreme Court to overturn marriage equality, the ongoing starvation of Gaza, etc. etc. etc. and God only knows what's going on in your life. This isn't a preaching service but a praying one, with a lot of help from author Cole Arthur Ri...
"How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity," sings the Psalmist (Psalm 133:1). Sure, it can be, but it's also really hard. In fact, sometimes the closer we are with our family, the harder it can be to "live together." But finding ways to live together in unity--not uniformity-- with our wider church family is an important part of following Jesus and a sign of the way and reign of God he preached and embodied. This Sunday we'll reflect on that work in light of decisi...
The political conflict between the state of Israel and Hamas is complicated by history, religion, anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim hatred, the entangling alliances with both parties, and, not least, the special place the state of Israel holds in the theological fantasies of American Evangelical Christians. But the moral calculus is much simpler. Israel isn't just conducting a war against Hamas but carrying out a campaign of genocide against the entire Palestinian people--men, women, and children--...
The ancient city of Sodom has been synonymous with sin and the consequences of sin for thousands of years. These days it’s sexual sin they’re most associated with and infamous for, specifically homosexuality. But that’s a modern development and not what the Hebrew prophets or even Jesus meant when they considered the city. For most of history, Sodom’s sin was understood to be the hoarding of resources and inhospitality to immigrants. So watch out, United States of America. Given how we’re tre...
Since at least the time of the ancient psalmists, God has been described as a king... and kings described as gods... and the rest of humanity (and, let's be real: men) as "a little lower than God," and called by God to exercise dominion--power over--creation by "divine right." But with the Spirit's help and Jesus' example, we can imagine a "more excellent way." The key is there in the root of the word "dominion" itself: God and human beings not as tyrants but domestic partners, sharing power ...
This Earth Sunday, we celebrate not God’s gift of the earth to us, but God’s gift to us of our interconnected relationship with the earth, God’s wider, deeper, higher, and altogether “very good” creation of which we are a part. Our guest preacher will be The Rev. Dr. Chris Davies, one of the executive ministers of our Southern New England Conference of our United Church of Christ denominational family… and an avid beekeeper! She will share with us spiritual lessons for our current moment she’...
At last we arrive at Easter Sunday. But oddly enough, Matthew's version of the story of the resurrection begins on Good Friday, with what sounds at first like a ghost story about tombs being opened and the dead walking. But it's a reminder that Easter doesn't belong just to the church and resurrection doesn't belong only to Jesus. Resurrection is for everyone, for the whole wide world, all the dry bones, all the walking dead, all the helpless and hopeless, even for us. (Matthew 27:45, 50-54)&...
Our purpose in this Lenten series has been to slow down and spend significant time reflecting on each step of the story of Jesus’ last days during what we call Holy Week. But he dies on Good Friday. So what happens, if anything, on Holy Saturday? What even can happen? Or should we just jump ahead to the Easter we know, 2000 years later, is coming on Sunday? Our special guest preacher, The Rev. Dr. Mary Luti, will help us sit with those questions and those feelings. This service is part of our...
A guided meditation: Did you know that before there was a Last Supper, there was a First Supper, when Jesus was prepared to endure the terrible events of the rest of Holy Week by the love of his friends. In particular, one woman anointed him with costly perfume, tears and laughter, intimacy and grief mingling together as it ran down, and the house was filled with the odor of holiness, of love. It's good to remember as we face our own hard choices, our struggle for justice is fueled best...
Jesus continues to wear out his welcome in Jerusalem. The various power blocs within the religious leadership of the day pepper him with questions, often trick questions, hoping to discredit him and his disciples in the eyes of the faithful without drawing the attention of the occupying Romans. But Jesus is never one to shy away from controversy for the sake of a larger and more loving Gospel, which angers those powers enough they begin to look for a way to shuffle him off the public stage, p...
In the wake of this election's seismic shift, we’re spending time grounding ourselves once more in the core message of 1 Corinthians 13:13—“Now faith, hope, and love abide, these three”—in ways that speak to our current situation, beginning with faith. This week it's hope. We talk about having hope, which sounds lovely... until you lose it. Then what are we supposed to do? But as peoples who've lived through the end of their own worlds--and still are--remind us, hope is something we do,...
*With apologies for the poorer than usual audio quality. A subtitled video is available at https://youtu.be/QOpgyCGCVf8 In Mark 10:17-31, an insider--the rich young ruler--and an outsider--Simon Peter--both ask Jesus essentially the same question: "What must we do to be saved?" Jesus' answer disappoints them both. He's not interested in what will set either man apart in God's eyes but what will bring them together here on earth. While the would wants to divide and subtract, the Gospel is all...
“God’s love and kindness will shine upon us like the sun that rises in the sky” (Luke 1:78-9, CEV). A celebration more than a decade in the making! Come join us for a special worship service dedicating the new solar panel array on our sanctuary roof. This giant leap forward was made that much more possible through donations given in loving memory of Deb Baldwin, a founding member of our Environmental Ministries Team and a prophetic voice for climate action, following her death in the spring o...
The gospels are full of miraculous stories of Jesus healing people, but they’re never told from the point of view of the people he heals. The (temporarily) able-bodied Church today is only beginning to understand how problematic that really is, whether we take these stories literally or metaphorically. Because nobody’s body is just a metaphor, and, as disability justice advocates like author Amy Kenny remind us, nobody’s body is just a prayer request. Our disabled God loves all our bodi...
In the wake of this election week’s seismic shift, we’re going to spend the next three Sundays looking to ground ourselves once more in 1 Corinthians 13:13—“Now faith, hope, and love abide, these three”—in ways that speak to our current situation. Faith isn’t a laundry list of six impossible things we have to believe before breakfast. Faith is trust (literally, in the New Testament Greek), and the basis of trust is truth. The Church has to be willing to embrace the truth of our and our neighb...
Shalom Auslander’s book, Beware of God, is full of cautionary tales about faith, including the short story “Waiting for Joe,” in which two hamsters from very different theological viewpoints try to cope with the absence of their owner. It may seem farcical on the surface, it’s a powerful call to interrogate our own faith (or lack thereof) and our image of God and remember that the God somebody hands you is never the only option. Join us Sundays for worship, LIVE! on-site and online via Zoom ...
To combat the current epidemic of isolation, loneliness, disaffiliation, and division destroying our physical, mental, and political health, experts prescribe a dose of social connection. Joining, sharing, learning to trust... and to be trustworthy... helps repair our social fabric, and our souls. Because, as the Apostle Paul reminds us, human beings are made for community. So, given how we've failed in the past, how can we make joining church good news for people again? (Romans 12:4-5) Joi...
“Even the sparrow finds a home and the swallow a nest for herself where she may lay her young, at your altars, O LORD of hosts, my King and my God.” Every creature, all of creation, has a home in the heart of our Creator. Why is it often so hard for us to feel we do, too? (Psalm 84) Join us Sundays for worship, LIVE! on-site and online via Zoom @ 10am ET. Connect at www.NeedhamUCC.org. --- The Congregational Church of Needham strives to be a justice-seeking, peace-making, love-affirming, LG...
In mathematics, a fractal is “a visual expression of a repeating pattern or formula that starts out simple and gets progressively more complex.” We see fractals in nature, in the patterns of pinecones and the spirals of sea shells, where, when we look closely, we see the signature of those basic building blocks repeating themselves throughout the whole. For us, God is that basic building block. If we look closely, in faith, at the “breadth and length and height and depth” of all creation, we ...