No matter who you are, or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome at First Congregational Church of Blue Hill.
If you are visiting us for the first time, please allow us to extend our warmest greetings. We are an open and affirming congregation of the United Church of Christ. Sunday Worship services are available in-person, via Zoom and live stream on Facebook. While masks are no longer required, we do ask that everyone mask while singing. We look forward to having you join us in worship.
Hello all! So another storm, another Zoom worship. I am looking forward to worshiping with you, and “seeing” some of you again. Our scripture readings for this 6th Sunday after Epiphany invite us to consider how we are called by God to live, in these times of uncertainty and turmoil. Do we live lives of blessing or lives of woe? Do we live as “shrubs in the desert, or” trees planted beside waters? ” Can we brings intention to our circumstances? There is a lot to explore in our worship as we watch the storm unfold.
Grace and peace to you, from God our Creator and the Lord Jesus Christ! While I was comfortably able to drive from my home just two miles from church, I do not suggest that anyone else do so. The church parking lot is not yet plowed, and to ask our sexton-stand-in (and helpful parishioners) to shovel as the snow continues to come down feels a bit much. So, please know that we WILL worship together, but on Zoom. I likely will remain in my office here, which will allow me to greet anyone who arrives in-person, who may not see this email. So, I look forward to our gathering together virtually at 10:00 for a relatively brief service sharing our prayers, the Word, and our grateful response.
Grace and peace to you, from God our Creator and the Lord Jesus Christ! Friends, the weather looks particularly iffy as we will gather for worship tomorrow morning. Please do not try to drive in if there is any question of your safety! We will, of course, be Zooming the service, and all are welcome to join us that way. We may not have a choir, but we will sing our hymns just as gustily, whether at home or in the sanctuary.
Our scripture readings this weekend invite us to a place of holy awe and to a very specific response to God’s effect on our lives. How do we respond to our awe? How do we respond to the holy? In the first of the Gospel stories of Jesus’ calling the disciples to follow him, we may hear our own call to respond. In a time in which we may be feeling as though we lack some agency, we know that Jesus calls us to act faithfully, with trust. Those are two things, each strengthened by the other. As we gather in worship, praising God for God’s gifts to us and closely regarding our own selves, our own souls, we may pray together that we are always moved to compassion and toward peace.
Grace to you and peace, from God our Creator and the Lord Jesus Christ! I remember what may have been among the most radical ideas I learned for the first time in seminary. Prior to taking a course on the Christian liturgical year, I had not consciously thought of the passage of time through any lens but the western calendar, a passing of seconds, minutes, hours, and then elements of that fixed 365 days broken into weeks, months and years. Decades passed as measurements of life’s passing, in individual or family mortal spans and in wider historical eras. Among those measurements was the designation of Sunday, a day of Sabbath rest. Enter the Christian liturgical year. For such a times as ours, I hope that this particular Sunday’s value will be new. Its significance to you before now may have been only the marking of mid-winter known by association to Punxatawny Phil the groundhog, but offers more certain hope in our Christian year. We remember the presentation of Jesus by his parents at the temple in Jerusalem, a day called Candlemas in some Christian traditions. This moment in the liturgical year falls between Christ’s birth Christmas and the resurrection we celebrate at Easter.
So, as we gather tomorrow in celebration of the sacrament of Communion, a chief ritual in our religious practice, I invite us all to remember that we live in a time marked by hope, which looks back on God’s prior gifts with gratitude and forward to God’s promises with praise. I invite us to celebrate that our time is not only marked by lives measured in bodily circumstances, but by deeply spiritual, holy times such as these.
Grace to you and peace, from God our Creator and the Lord Jesus Christ! Pulitzer Prize winning author Annie Dillard wrote in Holy the Firm, “”There is no one but us. There is no one to send, not a clean hand or a pure heart on the face of the earth or in the earth—only us… unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and uninvolved. But there is no one but us. There has never been.” This idea of our own ability and, perhaps, to do what we are able to do in the face of challenges may be something to hold in the days ahead. Perhaps a similar feeling is what motivated the apostle Paul and his Messiah, Jesus, as we hear from them this week.
The story we hear of Jesus’ “inaugural address” to the people of Nazareth recalls to his listeners and to us that God has promised a year of Jubilee, when debts are forgiven and healing promised. The response of the crowd and the connection to our purposes today may challenge us, and therefore bear reflection. With Paul’s extended metaphor of the Body of Christ and God’s gifts to empower it, to empower us, we may begin to imagine how to help provide hope in a time of challenge.
Accompanying our choir this week is George Emlen, who is now a regular part of our musical rotation. Many thanks to George, and to Tina Dreisbach for coordinating our talented and changing lineup of musicians!
Grace to you and peace, from God our Creator and the Lord Jesus Christ! Friends, this is a momentous week, as we sit on the brink of a historic inauguration, which falls on the day on which we celebrate a great moral and spiritual leader. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a prophet of the finest kind, who listened closely for God’s leading in his life and who spoke truth to power as a result. He did so at the risk of his life, which indeed ended with a maniac’s vicious choice. If you are moved to learn more and to be empowered by solidarity with others who yearn for a nation guided by love and compassion and committed to liberty and justice for all, you may like to tune in to the program whose link is attached here. From the publicity materials for this event, we learn that “For Such a Time as This: A Prophetic Response to America’s Defining Moment” will bear witness to this moment and affirm our unwavering commitment to justice, equity, and the dignity of all people. In a time when our nation longs for justice, healing and unity, this event aims to center love and justice while challenging the divisive narratives that too often misrepresent the role of faith in public life.
Our worship service tomorrow will, likewise, honor Dr. King and draw us together as we meet this time with hope and with unwavering faith in God, who loves us all and who has taught us what we need to be for others. With our instrumental consort and chimes choir leading us in inspirational songs of resistance and hope, our worship should send us into the week, strenghthened for the journey.
