Why I Am Christian

Rev. Judith Brain Preaching

Blessing of the Animals

Rev Laura Ruth Jarrett Preaching

Creative Expressions on Race, 1 of 4

This is part 1 of 4 of the Creative Expressions on Race program held at First Church Somerville. Part 1 features a poem by Meck and the music of First Church Somerville's Children's Choir directed by Thom Whittemore and Assisted by Melissa Hines

As part of its Sacred Conversations on Race Project, First Church Somerville invited artists to show and to perform works that illuminate and further our conversation on race and racism. This evening, which included spoken word, music, poetry, and visual art was called “Creative Expression on Race,” and was held on Sunday, March 22, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Somerville, 89 College Ave, Somerville, MA 02144.

www.firstchurchsomerville.org

Persevering up Heartbreak Hill, Racism Panel Discussion

Persevering up Heartbreak Hill is the Panel Discussion on Racism that was held at First Congregational Church of Somerville on April 30, 2009.

The speakers were; Elena Letona, who served as Centro Presente’s Executive Director; Somerville’s Police Chief, Anthony Holloway; our Associate General Minister of the national United Church of Christ, Edith Guffey; and Wellesley professor and the author of “The Knapsack of White Privilege”, Peg McIntosh will be our panelists. This panel of experts spoke about racism in Somerville, racism in religion, and racism in our congregations, amongst other things. The panel was moderated by Tim Duhamel and LaTayna Purnell.

Pray As You Can, Not As You Can't

Rev. Molly Phinney Baskette ~ First Church Somerville

Sunday, October 5, 2008 ~ Twenty-First Sunday in Pentecost

Philippians 4:6-9

“Pray As You Can, Not As You Can’t”

There you are, 47 hours from now. It is 9 am on a Tuesday, and you are sitting on the tarmac at Logan waiting for your flight to take off. You look calm because you are good at faking it, but your palms are sweating, your breathing is shallow, and you are afraid. You are sure that this time your fear is so powerful it will actually cause the hydraulics to fail, or the pilot’s attention to waver for a moment, resulting in tragedy for everyone aboard this 737.

It is 9 am on a Tuesday, and you have just arrived at your desk. You postpone the days’ work and type the login to your retirement fund. You are deeply disturbed to see that the balance has dropped by 8% overnight. It doesn’t matter that you are not going to retire for 38.2 years. All that money, your money, has just slipped away into the ether and the panic of the economic crisis.

It is 9 am on a Tuesday, and you are putting your grad school applications in the mail. You are leaving your child crying at the day care center. You are checking your phone to see if the cutie you had a first date with last night texted you. You are driving by the panhandler on Fresh Pond Parkway. You are reaching for a cigarette. You are clutching your chest as your heart twinges again. You are thinking about climate change, or the price of gas, or Iran’s nukes.

You are doing these things, and you are worrying. You are doing these things, and it never once enters your mind to pray about them.

There are a lot of things that are complicated about Christianity, and we eggheady seeker types can generally be counted on to make them more complicated than perhaps they need to be. Trinitarian theology, for example, or the coffee hour schedule. But some things about Christianity are simple. Prayer is one of those things that may turn out to be quite simple, really. We can’t control the outcome if we do pray; we don’t know whether or how or when God will answer our prayers. But no one can deny us the right and privilege of prayer, no one can tell us how to do it, or not do it. There is nothing to stop us from praying, right here and right now, or at any moment of our lives.

It may be that you have a good reason for not praying. I’m trying to think of what it might be.

You are allergic to dogs, ragweed, and prayer? They have medicine for that now.

You believe your prayers are so powerful that they might actually bring about world peace, and then the military-industrial complex would go bust and throw millions of people out of work.

Or maybe it’s that it’s been a long time since you prayed, and you feel that God might be annoyed with you for suddenly showing up. A God so petty would not be worthy of our prayers, and if we really believed in that God, I doubt any of us would be here today.

There are a lot of reasons not to pray. But there are more, and better, reasons to pray. It could be that your prayer will be the fulcrum on which the lever of God’s justice or peace rests, and it will actually have tangible, verifiable results. But whether or not your praying changes the world, it will certainly change you. Joe’s going to talk more about that next week.

So my bulletproof logic has now demolished your resistance, and you are ready to pray, right? How do you do it?

We pray personally. Teresa of Avila said that prayer was nothing more than entering into terms of friendship with God. Even if the God you believe in is not a person, or a personality, but a great and numinous life-force, this is not a bad starting place. Prayer is, at heart, conversation with a most loving Someone or Something.

Which reminds me. It happens sometimes, pretty often, that I think I’ve prayed but I haven’t. All I have done is make a mental note, or had a good thought. There is no sense of conversation. I did this when I was flying through a thunderstorm from Atlanta last month. A couple of hours in, it was my palms that were sweating. “How is it that I’ve prayed, and I still feel so afraid?” I asked myself. Then I realized, I hadn’t prayed. I’d made a mental note, something like this: “I’m afraid of flying through this thunderstorm, and I bet God can take away my fear.” To really pray, I had to first name God,

“God?”

and enter into conversation,

“Please surround me with a sense of your strength, and take away my fear.”

At risk of sounding facile, my fear just melted away. Sometimes, it really is that simple.

We pray daily. Kathleen Norris says she has a hard time praying because her perfectionism gets in the way, and so does her general laziness. If she can’t pray well, she doesn’t want to do it at all. At times like this, she hums or sings bits and pieces of hymns. She says the Lord’s Prayer, or a fragment of one of the creeds. She makes prayer akin to household chores—it’s better to fold a bit of the laundry than to let it keep piling up.

Prayer is not just for Sundays, something to be enshrined and exalted; it is for everyday use. Like toothbrushing or dishes or any other regular maintenance, we shouldn’t get discouraged that it has to be done over and over again, that it seems like we’re always back where we started. Mothers and fathers know this. They wash the same bottoms and feed the same mouths over and over again, and never question the validity of this work. Well…

Daily prayer gives us a larger perspective, a sense of shared responsibility with God, a way out of no way. It provides a counterforce to the anxiety that threatens to leak in from every direction.

Did you know that that word Paul uses in Philippians, “the peace of God will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus,” that that word GUARD is a military term? It means, “to stand sentry.” Can you imagine UN peacekeeping troops stationed around your heart and you mind? Can you imagine what your outlook would be if you invested $700 billion a year in troops and equipment to defend your heart and mind against anxiety? The very same powers that resurrected Jesus are also at your service.

We pray, as we cook, with the ingredients at hand. Laura Ruth said last week that there are a lot of ways to pray, and not all of them involve words. One clue that you might be praying is if you are so deeply engaged in something—in making art or making food or making love—that you lose a sense of yourself and your own separateness from the rest of Creation.

But for those who would like a little more direction, a homework assignment, if you will, here you go. It’s called the Examen of Consciousness, and it’s been around for 5 centuries, since the founder of the Jesuit order, St. Ignatius of Loyola received it, in his words, as a gift from God. The examen doesn’t require any special training, a black belt in belief or hours logged in church. You don’t need to go shopping on the way home to get ready for it; you already have all the ingredients in your spiritual pantry.

Briefly, the examen has five steps. For the attention-impaired or those who are visual learners, there’s a handout you can pick up on the way out of church. It’s from an article by the Jesuit priest Dennis Hamm, called “Rummaging for God: Praying Backward through Your Day.” All you need to pray this prayer, is a day to pray over. It’s a prayer that can be prayed in the evening before you turn on the tube, or after you’ve gotten under your cozy blankets, so it has a deep appeal to the lazy among us, as well as the control freaks, who will find it hard to turn the day over to God until it’s almost over. Sometimes, the whole day slips away before we remember to give it back to God, and this is a prayer for people like us.

The first step is: pray for light. As we look back over the day, we’re not asking for memory, but “graced understanding.” The point is to see what the day looks like to God, not just to ourselves.

The second step is: give thanks for what was in the day. Hamm calls it “fondling the beautiful gifts of work, relationships, food, challenges.” Philippians advises us to make thanksgiving a part of every single prayer, and not limit ourselves to petition, asking. The act of thanking makes us more thankful, and likely to notice the blessings of life. And if we’re tired and we fall asleep at this point, before making it through steps three, four and five, well, we’ve had dessert first.

The third step is: review the feelings that surface in the replay of the day, paying close attention to where we get snagged. Feelings are neutral, neither morally good nor bad; it is what we choose to do with them that makes them so, so don’t censor your feelings in any way before God. Hamm says that strong feelings are clear signals of where the spiritual action was during the day.

The fourth step is: to choose just one of those feelings and pray from it. “The feeling is a sign that something important was going on.” Let a prayer rise up out of this feeling: a confession, a petition for understanding, a lament or praise. Let God work on this feeling with you, take you further. You’re not alone anymore.

The fifth and final step is: look toward tomorrow. We have been forgiven the things we did today that we regret, and we have let go of the things we left undone; we have, finally, given the day back to God. We don’t have to leave God out of the tomorrow until it is over, too. Take your appointment calendar under the covers with you, look ahead to the next day’s plans and demands, hopes and fears, and ask God to be with you in whatever you are facing.

Anne Lamott reminds us that: “Augustine said you have to start your relationship with God all over from the beginning, every day. Yesterday’s faith does not wait for you like a dog with your slippers and the morning paper in its mouth. You seek it, and in seeking it, you find it.”

It is 9 pm. Twelve hours have gone by. The sun set a while ago but your body is just catching up to the end of the day. You ease into your chair, you fall gratefully into bed, under your down comforter. You are not alone. You are never alone.

Burned By God

Rev. Molly Phinney Baskette ~ First Church Somerville
Sunday, May 11, 2008 ~ Feast of Pentecost
Acts 2:1-21
"Burned By God"

The preacher Barbara Brown Taylor reminds us of a story about Blaise Pascal,
the French philosopher and physicist. "When he died in 1662, his servant
found a scrap of paper hidden in the lining of his coat. It turned out to be
a testimony of something that had happened eight years earlier, which Pascal
had written down and kept close to his heart. Here is what it said:

In the year of Grace, 1654,
On Monday, 23rd of November,
Feast of St. Clement, Pope and Martyr,
And of others in the Martyrology,
Vigil of Saint Chrysogonus,
Martyr and others,
From about half past ten in the evening
Until about half past twelve
FIRE
God of Abraham, God of Isaac,
God of Jacob
Not of the philosophers and scholars.
Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.
God of Jesus Christ.

"Whatever happened to him that Monday night, FIRE was all he could say about
it. For two whole hours, nothing but FIRE-not the fire of philosophers and
scholars, but the fire of God, unmediated, undeniable, and finally,
unsayable, although the few words Pascal plucked out of the flames have more
power in them than five pages of precise description. These were the words
he carried next to his heart."

Pascal kept these words close to his heart because he wanted to remember. He
carried words because he couldn't carry that fire itself with him.

Nomadic primitive peoples used to carry a live coal around with them in a
hollowed-out bit of wood or shell so that they would always have fire
available. Having fire meant the difference between life and death. Today,
we turn a dial on a stove, we push the button on a plastic stick, and a
flame pops out. We are masters of the flame, we have domesticated and tamed
it. But for all this, we still can't summon the fire of the Holy Spirit at
will.

The fact that God's fire does not come at our beck and call seems right.
After all, God is God, and we are...not. But it is frightening, too. It is
frightening, because God might come at any time, without warning, in the
middle of supper, when things are good and peaceful and just the way we like
them for once. Or God might never come at all, though we cry and plead.

Years ago, I confessed to my spiritual director that I was afraid of going
into our church sanctuary alone. I thought God might see me vulnerable and
choose that moment to show up, a burning pew stopping me on my way to tidy
the Parlor cushions.

It's funny that I feel perfectly safe entering the sanctuary when it is
crowded with people. "Surely," I think, "God won't show up when there are so
many of us around on Sunday at 10 am."

But of course, this is wishful thinking. There is no safety in numbers. On
the day of Pentecost, they were there from "every nation under heaven," tons
of people gathered together, when little tongues of flame started dropping
out of the sky and setting them on fire. Just as Jesus had predicted, the
Holy Spirit descended on God's people, and burned them something fierce.
After that, they were able to do the kinds of things Jesus did, which was
exciting: they could make the blind see and the lame walk, they could speak
in foreign languages they had never gone on study abroad programs to learn.
Women led, the poor were fed, a new community exploded into being.

But there was a shadow side to the gift of this Spirit. To whom much is
given, much will be demanded. The early apostles were banished, imprisoned,
or executed. We are right to be cautious when God shows up, in burning bush,
pillar of flame, the funeral pyre Abraham approached on which to sacrifice
his only child Isaac before God provided a substitute at the last moment.
Even the dancing flames of Pentecost are not safe, because we know we will
have to sacrifice something to receive this gift.

We want a God who comes on our timetable, and who always comes to make life
sweeter. You have a strawberry. I want you to put it in your mouth, slowly,
eat it slowly, let the flavors develop and unfold. This is the sweetness of
sunlight turned into sugar, this too is the fire of God. Be fed.

A couple of weeks ago my 6 year old son confessed to finding some matches,
and coming up to the sanctuary, alone, to practice lighting them. Clearly,
he is not afraid of being alone in this sanctuary, nor of the fire, either
from God or human hands. His curiosity and desire outpaced his good sense,
and perhaps this is one more reason why Jesus said we ought to become like
little children if we don't want to miss out on the kingdom of God.

I gave my son a long lecture in fire safety after that, and painted drastic
pictures of a smoking ruin of a church. A week later, he did it again. I
marched him down to the fire station and asked the sternest-looking
firefighter on duty to have a talk with him. The firefighter said, "Uh,
don't do it again. And hey, next time you come down I'll put you up on the
fire truck and let you beep the horn." That's when I realized: I've brought
him to the wrong guy. I've brought him to the guy who likes fire and heads
into it.

You have in your other hand some chili pepper. Put some, but not all of it,
on your tongue. Feel it burn. Have you been burned in life? Have you been
burned by the church? Have you been burned by God? These are not all the
same things, but they can look the same from the outside.

Barbara Brown Taylor preaches that most of us are not up to direct encounter
with God. We want to be warmed; we do not want to be burned. But safe fire
is our invention, and so is a safe God. Neither one exists in reality.

If fire breaks out, we are to close doors to keep it from spreading. Some of
us know, because we have encountered the fire of God, what it is to leave
all of the doors inside of us open. We know that if we leave every room
available, that fire will tear through our whole being, and destroy
everything flammable. Flannery O'Connor speaks of heaven in terms of having
even our virtues burned away. This is the cleansing fire of God.

Ask Michael Schulman, who read in Portuguese for us today. Ask him about the
fire that destroyed his successful catering business after he moved back
from Brazil. That business was killing his spirit. He knows this fire
brought him to God.

Ask anyone who has been burned in life, and managed to see just what God was
burning away. Ask someone who has had their heart broken and mended, who has
gotten sick and healed, who has gotten drunk and then gotten sober with
God's help.

Ask any mother who has given birth, especially without benefit of epidural.
It burns.

All of it burns.

And yet not one of these people, who understand that God's fire is not safe
but it is always, always, good, would prefer the alternative. The chilly
absence of God, the safe but lonely life, the heart unbroken that has never
known love.

You have left in your hands a flame of a berry, and a little bit of pepper.
Dip the berry in the pepper and eat it now, slowly, slowly. Let the flavors
mingle and unfold and deepen each other. Do you really want your sweet
without your spicy? Would you really, really, rather be bored by God than
scared by God?

In the year of Grace, 2008,
On Sunday, 11th of May,
Feast of Pentecost,
Vigil of Mother's Day,
From about half past ten in the morning
Until about half past twelve
FIRE
God of Abraham, God of Isaac,
God of Jacob
Not of the philosophers and scholars.
Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.
God of Jesus Christ.

Dry Dry Dry

Laura Ruth Jarret our new Minister of Outreach preaches to our community for the first time. She talks about Jesus' 40 days and 40 nights in the dessert as well as struggling with windshield wipers. Listen and enjoy as Laura Ruth preaches Dry Dry Dry.