At the Historical Society Building, Mrs. Alice Dickinson provided a highlight of the day as she shared some charming reminiscences of the Litchfield community and the church.  Many thanks to Dr. Stephen Calawa, President of the Society, who open the Historical Society building and displayed a number of  interesting antiques and Litchfield artifacts.

We are very grateful to all who pitched in and contributed their time and energies to the day.  Especially those who worked for hours preparing and serving the delicious hotdogs and sausage sandwiches and the fabulous strawberry shortcake.  A delightful Litchfield tradition is happily revived!

In gratitude to God and in respect and affection for our animals, we will share together in a service of “The Blessing of the Animals.”  The special outdoor service is a first for our church, and will be held this Sunday June 14, 2009 at 10:00AM.  Invite your human friends and bring your animal friends to be blessed.  Animals of all types and sizes are welcome, but please be sure they are under control.

This opportunity begins in late summer, 2009. Our current organist is a very talented young man who will be attending college in the Fall.

ORGANIST Job Description

• Play at regular Sunday Worship service (currently 10:00AM) and weekly rehearsal with choir (currently 7:00-9:00PM, Thursdays, but possibly flexible). Provide appropriate choral music and responses in coordination with the pastor.
• Play at special services such as Maundy Thursday, Christmas Eve service and Ash Wednesday service, and other special services that may be approved by Faith Committee and Session.
• Coordinate special music to be played during the worship service with the pastor as may be appropriate for the Sunday theme and season of the church year.
• The organist is entitled to four (4) paid Sundays off to be used as vacation or personal time; also two (2) Sundays for sick time with pay.
• Play for weddings and funerals, as required, at negotiated rates.

Contact:

Mike Couture
Personnel Committee Chair
Litchfield Community Church, Presbyterian
603.305.9427

• Place bags filled with non-perishable food items next to your mailbox.  We always have needs for the following items: spaghetti sauce, peanut butter, jelly, canned spam, canned chicken, canned ravioli, and breakfast cereal.
• Meet us at the Riverside Cottage across the street from the church to at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday to help sort out the donated food items.
• Support the food pantry with a monetary donation.  Mail checks payable to Litchfield Community Church Presbyterian to 259 Charles Bancroft Hwy, Litchfield, NH 03052 (put Food Pantry on the memo line so we know where to direct your contribution).

Thank you for supporting us in this valuable mission to the Litchfield community.

There once was a man named Hobson who owned a livery stable.  He had a few horses to rent out and in order to rotate the use of the animals, he would move them, each in turn, to a stall nearest the door of his establishment.  He would then offer his customers a choice.  They could take the animal in the stall nearest the door, or they could take no animal at all.

Thus, so the story goes, originated the term “a Hobson’s choice.”  It is a choice, which in point of fact, is no choice at all.  “Like it or lump it.” “Take it or leave it.”  It is the appearance of multiple options when there is actually only one.  As Henry Ford famously said of his Model T, you could choose to have it in any color you wanted, so long as it was black.

The hard economic times we are all facing reminds me of another story.  In Bisbee, Arizona, in the early years of the 20th century, a dispute between copper mining companies and mineworkers developed. In 1917, the workers had organized in labor unions and approached the company management with a list of demands for better pay and conditions. The mining companies responded by giving their workers a choice.  On the one hand, they could continue to accept the harsh and underpaid work at the rock-face of the copper mines or, on the other, they could accept unemployment and poverty.  The workers said that this choice put them “between a rock and a hard place.”
I hate to be “between a rock and a hard place” don’t you?   The worst part of hardship, economic or otherwise is to have no good choices.  It is horrible to feel hemmed in by circumstances, to feel stuck in a dead end situation, to feel powerless, constrained and constricted.  It is like the walls are closing in on you.  You feel hopeless, as though there is nothing you can do, or as though anything you try to do is futile.  Every option is a bad one.  Every human feels this way sometime.

The Bible is a wonderful book, because it is so human.  It looks our humanity square in the face, and tells it like it is.  The poet writes, Out of my distress I called on the LORD; the LORD answered me and set me in a broad place.  He understands that deliverance, salvation if you will, means being set in a broad place.  He cries out of his distress – out from his confinement, out of where he is stuck between a rock and a hard place.  He cries out because he has no good choices, no real options. Who is this person?  What is this rock and this hard place?

This is the person who has to choose between two unbearable choices.  He is surrounded by his enemies and faced with the choice of surrender or conquest.  But he cries out not only for himself.  He cries out for everyone who is hemmed in, surrounded and out of good options.  He cries for the elderly man who has to choose between giving up a meal or giving up a prescription.  He speaks for the single mother who has to choose between the humiliation of welfare and the indignity of $7.25 an hour.   He cries out for all the lonely, for all the imprisoned, for all the homeless, all the addicted. He cries out for everyone who must endure injustice, who lives with violence or lives without hope. He speaks for them all, for us all, for all who cry out of their distress.  Above all the poet cries out for the dead young rabbi closed in by the cold stone tomb.  For the crucified Christ who cried out, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” For the dead Messiah who can no longer cry out for himself.

And what is God’s response to this cry?  How does God answer?  What does the poet say? “the LORD answered me and set me in a broad place.”   The imagery is beautiful.  God takes him from the confinement of a place with no good options, from between the rock and the hard place and sets him in a wide-open space, in a broad place.  God puts him in a place without narrow boundaries, a place with room to move about, a place where he is no longer tightly limited, where he has choices.  This is the answer that God makes for human distress, God wants to make people free – free to choose among many possible options, all of them potentially good.

This is a big part of what Easter means.  God shows us in Christ what is God’s intention for all people.  Jesus described his own sending, a mission fulfilled in his resurrection: he uses these words, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”   This is Christ’s mission: to bring good news to the poor… to let the oppressed go free.  Jesus came to announce God’s intention to take people from between a rock and a hard place, and to set them in a broad place, a wide-open and free space.

One of the meanings of the word “transform” is to move across boundaries into a new form, a new mode of being.  When the prisoner is set free his world is transformed.  When the oppressed find justice, their world is transformed.  When the exploited are treated with dignity and respect, their world is transformed.  When the addicted are treated, it is transformation.  When poor are lifted out of their poverty, when the hungry are fed, when the homeless are sheltered, when the sick made well and the broken are made whole, the world for them is transformed.  They are set in a broad place and given a whole new world of options.  That is the mission of Christ, and that is the power of resurrection.

Now my friends, you know very well that as much as God intends this to be so, as much as God intends the world to be transformed, it can only come about through the direct action of people doing good work, doing God’s work.  God always works in and through human hearts and human hands.  This work is placed in our hands.  It is the human world that needs transformation and it is for humans to transform it.  This is our business.  It is our business to feed the hungry, the shelter the exposed, to comfort the grieving, to make whole the broken, to give people real options, to give them something better than a Hobson’s choice, to get them out from between the rock and the hard place.

We have taken some steps to do this, but there is much more that can be done, much more that we can do.  Our purpose as God’s people is to worship God by transforming the world.  This begins when we look around us.  Observe and take note where the restraints are.  Where are the prisoners and what makes their prisons?  Where are the narrow places where the choices are no good?  Where are the dark and dismal tombs of discouragement and despair?  Who are lonely?  Who are struggling?  Who are stuck?  That’s where it begins.  Then what can we do about it?  What help can we offer? What support can we give?  What space can we create?  These are the questions, and the answers can lead to the transformation of the world.

But are we not too small for this?  Are we not too weak, too poor, too few?  Only if we think that God is small, that love is too weak, that compassion is too poor, that one or two and Jesus are too few.  In the tomb, Jesus was weak beyond weakness, he was poor beyond poverty, he was alone in the cold, dark, narrow place.  It was from there that it all began.  I imagine a slight small stirring of the spirit, blowing up into a storm, a rushing wind, lifting hearts and inspiring minds with the presence of Christ, the power of love, the possibility of hope.  The few followers of Jesus knew he was living still, not dead, not entombed, not hemmed in and held down.  With great joy they began to proclaim the news, and to care for one another, and to invite others in, and to heal and help and do good in Christ’s name.  And from that small beginning, from those few, those poor, those little ones, the fire started.

We are not too small, not too weak, not too poor or too few.  We can transform our little corner of the world, for the risen Christ is here as much as anyplace, the risen Christ is now as surely as at any time.  Christ is risen!  Let us sing!

Spring is slowly making its way upon us and it’s time for a clean-up day to get ready for the Easter season.

Saturday April 4 is

CHURCH CLEAN-UP DAY

9:00 AM til when you need to leave.

Bring Yard Tools

PASS THE WORD!

Here are some thoughts distilled from a recent sermon on Wisdom. The reading are from Proverbs 8 and John 1:1-3

Before the beginning of the cosmos, before physics or mathematics, certainly before geology or biology, and long before psychology, there was a reason, a purpose, a logic, a will, a desire, an intention.  In the New Testament this purposeful energy is personified as the “Logos” of God.  In the Old Testament, and especially in the book of Proverbs, purposeful energy is personified as the female principle, Sophia - Wisdom.

This logic, this wisdom, has to do with the right order of things.  It is the principle by which everything from subatomic particles to humans in society is intended to operate.  It is an intention of deep harmony, mutual care and interdependence.

It is the way of goodness and life.  We may even say that the idea of “the good” is the presence of this order, this intention, in the realm of human thought.  “The good” is not a derivative of ethics or morality, it is a self-evident principle that transcends and judges ethics and morality. Wisdom is the way that a good father orders his household, it is the way a good mother lovingly orders her children, not according to any rule, but according to the guidance of “the good.”

When we see the shades or hear the echoes of this harmonious order in our world, we perceive this as beauty.  We say that something - a sunset - a piece of music - a loving family - is beautiful when it exhibits or displays something of this deep harmonious order.

To be guided in our actions by this deep order is to live in wisdom.  In religious language, we might say that it is to live by the Word of God.  By that, I most emphatically do not mean the Bible, but rather the living Word (Logos, Sophia) that, as Jesus says, “proceeds from the mouth of God.” Another way to say this is that the mother wisdom that nurtures and orders and cares for everything should be the guiding principle by which we live our lives

Wisdom is the fitting, timely, apposite, situationally appropriate, right, application of knowledge.  It is a fallacy to think that there is a timeless and universally appropriate rule for right, good, or godly behavior.  Discernment is always required. It is necessary for us to judge what is fitting and when.  SQ

Galatians 5:14 “For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “The … great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; [is] that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other.”  (The Over-Soul, 1841)

Today I want to show the nature of our relationship to one another, and then based upon that relationship, I want to show our responsibility to one another.

Do you know what is the world’s largest creature?  We may think of elephants, giant squids, or whales, perhaps we’ll even think of a dinosaur. But we’d be wrong on every count.  It depends upon how you measure it, but by some measures, the world’s largest living organism is the Populus tremuloides (trem u low id eez).  It is 80,000 years old and  weighs 12 million pounds.  Imagine that!  Of course this creature is not an animal at all, but a giant grove of quaking aspen trees in the Rocky Mountains of Utah.  Extensive DNA testing has shown that the entire grove is in fact one vast male aspen tree with a huge interconnected root system.  This forest, which covers many acres of land, appears as many individual trees, but in fact it is only one giant organism.

I believe that the entire human race is connected in a way something like this.  We are one vast organism – in our case, not merely a biological organism, but a spiritual organism.  We all share the same life… we are animated by the same spirit.

The Source of our life is a Unitary Spirit.  It is a single Life Force, a single Creating Energy, a single Over-Soul (as Emerson called it).  In the language of the Bible, this creating, animating, life giving Source is called Elohim: the Divine One.  The Jewish name for Elohim is Yahweh, “I Am.”  In common parlance we call it God. 

Imagine vast, unbounded Being, not “a” being, but Being itself.  We find it difficult adequately to think of this Principle of Life,  this infinitely conscious, aware, good, and self-giving Essence.  But that unlimited Life-giving Life is what we mean by God.  When we think of God as “a” being, we usually end up thinking of a big “man” in the sky.  Admittedly some of the language of the Bible leads us to think this way, but it will not do.  God is not a really big, really smart, really powerful, really good being.  Not even the “Supreme Being.”  God is Being itself, and following our analogy of the Aspen tree, God is both the root system of all being and the nourishing soil in which every being is rooted.  The analogy, like all analogies, breaks down, but is still useful.  A better image has God a the fountainhead, the eternal spring from which flows the water of life.  This living water flows into all beings and by it all beings are sustained.  As the Bible says. “In God we live and move and have our being.”

So, from this point of view, it is not as though we each have an individual, separate soul. Even though we speak of “my soul” or “your soul,” of “his soul” and “her soul;” there is actually only one “soul” of which we all partake.  That is, we take part in a single human soul, which is not separate from or even different than the Life that is God.  God is not the collective human soul.  I am not saying that.  God is more than that.  God is the Life without limit of which each human life may be seen as a particular, limited instance.  As a Buddhist might say, “A wave on the ocean is not the ocean, but the water that is the wave is not other than or separate from the ocean.”  If we think of it in this way, God is the ocean and we are the waves, and every wave is connected to every other wave because all waves are part of the same ocean.  The ocean has dark and unfathomed depths that the waves do not know, but the waves are no less one with the ocean because of this.  Being has depths which no particular beings can know, but they are no less one with Being because of this.  To use Biblical language, there is “one God, [the parents] of all, who is above all and through all and in all.”

It is clear then, that the command to “love your neighbor as yourself” is not using metaphorical language when it says “as yourself.”  The individual, separate and autonomous self is an illusion as far as this teaching is concerned.  There is no such thing.  This is underscored by the great image of the Christian Community; “The Body of Christ”, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” (1 Cor. 12:9)

The command to love our neighbor as ourselves recognizes that the self and the neighbor are one, since they are completely connected at the source. To love the neighbor is actually and not metaphorically to love the self.  Furthermore, since it is God who is the animating principle present in the neighbor as in the self, when we love God, we must love each other, and when we love each other, we,  in fact, are loving God.  That’s what the Bible says.

Jesus was once teaching on the commandment that we must love our neighbor as ourselves, when a clever man tried to trip him up.  “Ah!” said the man, “but just who is my neighbor?”  In response Jesus told him a story, the great parable of the Good Samaritan.  The point of the story is that the neighbor is the one who is in need.  Or rather, the one who helps, makes himself or herself a neighbor to anyone whom he or she chooses.  When we see somebody in need, we are called upon to love that person as ourselves, for the need that I see is my own need as well.   The Good Samaritan didn’t say to himself, “Not my problem.”  His understanding was that whatever human problem he encountered was his problem since, as part of the human race, he is one soul with all other humans.

The first people whom we must love as ourselves are those who are closest to ourselves.  As the old saying goes, “Charity begins at home.”  It doesn’t end there, but it begins there.  The people we encounter every day are the ones we must attend to first.  There are many, many needs right across the breakfast table from us, right next door, right in the pew beside us.  There are people here who feel ignored, who are suffering alone, who have real needs going unmet.  These needs are part of me, they are my needs as surely as any.  Let us pay attention to the people near to us, for through familiarity, they are too easily overlooked.

But we must also become aware of the needs beyond the range of our immediate vision.  There are needs in our world, which belong to us as well.  There are many millions who suffer from sheer neglect.  There are millions who are not powerful, who have no voice, whose tears are shed in secret.  They cannot command anybody’s attention.  And for the want of attention, they suffer and die.  It is our responsibility to these, who are no less a part of us, to pay attention.  It is our responsibility to raise our awareness, to look and to listen and then to feel with them and to do what we can.  As a church, we need to do better in looking beyond ourselves. We need to pay greater attention and find ways to do more.

Beloved, if we can acknowledge that as humans we are one soul with all humans, that we are connected at our source, if we can attend to the real needs that are all around us, and if we can resolve to act, to do whatever we can, then we will be doing all that true religion requires.   “For all the law [of God, and all true religion] is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”  May it be so with us.