Niebuhr Prayer for Nation

O Lord, unless you build the house, its builders will have toiled in vain. Unless you watch over the city, in vain the watchman stands on guard.

Look with mercy upon this company of your children that our labors may be crowned by your grace. Help us to be diligent in the disciplines of our calling and to engage in them in the fear of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom. Bind us together through our common responsibilities and prevent by your grace the frictions of sinful purpose from destroying the unity of the body of Christ. Give us the spirit of forbearance with one another, teaching us to forgive one another, even as you also in Christ have forgiven us. Help us to do the duty which each hour and day demands of us, but grant us grace also to have a vision of the constancy of your will above the chances and changes of our mortal life. Let us not be tempted by our weakness to evade the tasks you have given us to do; nor be tempted by our strength to estimate ourselves too highly. Grant that your strength may be made perfect in our weakness and your mercy purify what we have corrupted. O Lord, rule and overrule our affections and wills, that your kingdom may come, even through the confusion of human passions, and your will be done despite the unruly affections of men.

Look with mercy upon the peoples of the world, so full both of pride and confusion, so sure of their righteousness and so deeply involved in unrighteousness, so confident of their power and so imprisoned by their fears of each other. Have mercy upon our own nation, called to such high responsibilities in the affairs of mankind. Purge us of the vainglory which confuses our counsels, and give our leaders and our people the wisdom of humility and charity. Help us to recognize our own affinity with whatever truculence or malice confronting us that we may not add to the world’s woe by the fury of our own resentments. Give your Church the grace in this time to be as a saving remnant among the nations, reminding all peoples of the divine majesty under whose judgment they stand, and of the divine mercy of which they and we have a common need.

Concerts

We have two concerts next weekend at the church. I hope you can enjoy one or both of them!

Vermont Youth Opera

Join the talented teen singers of the Opera Company of Middlebury’s Youth Opera program in their fall opera-scenes production: a spoof on a Gilbert & Sullivan podcast! Scenes from Iolanthe, Patience, and The Mikado have been woven into an inventive script by guest Stage Director Erik Kroncke. Music Director Mary Jane Austin leads from the piano.

No advance tickets – admission by donation at the door.

Eleva Chamber Players

Tickets may be purchased at https://www.elevachamberplayers.com/events

Maintaining Love’s Promise

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
–Robert Frost

Each year it is my delight to write to you a letter asking you to make a financial pledge to our church. It is an honor to reflect on the gifts of our life together and to thank you for the community we have here. I offer this year’s meditation on God’s constant goodness even in the face of the reality of our experience of so much darkness, trusting that in response not to me, but to God, you would make your pledge of support to the ministry of God’s love for this place and the world.

Frost’s beloved poem, ‘Nothing Gold can Stay’ refers to humankind’s fall in The Book of Genesis. The early church wisely called this the felix culpa, the “fortunate fault,” for without it, humanity would be stuck in the Garden of Eden with no future. The felix culpa was Adam claiming freewill on behalf of all humankind. Life is too wonderful and interesting, the myth suggests, not to be on a grand adventure. While God is indeed angry that Adam broke the only rule given them, God’s anger is muted. God curses the serpent who lured them into eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And God puts conditions on the newly born human freewill. Significantly, God does not curse humanity! Instead the ground receives God’s anger and Eden sank to grief.

This moment of Eden’s sinking to grief marks the height of myth. Humankind is freed and the relationship between humans and God becomes an adult relationship of love with responsibility. For God’s part, this love is not pollyannaish. It is not a love that looks away from evil, but a love that judges it and then provides a new day. Eden sank to grief, the dawn (our infancy, our unformed conscience) goes down, but it goes down, to the day – to day-light, to life lived with the potential for fullness and the awareness of extraordinary gifts, the beauty and wonder of which we are continually discovering and rediscovering.

By the time you receive this letter much of the gold that has re-appeared this month from beneath summer’s green will have dropped to the ground, preparing the soil for next spring’s gold. Because nothing gold can stay, love’s promise is maintained; the world is always new and our responsibility in it always vital and ongoing.

God’s story with us is a story of the utterly unearned free gift of love calling us into the new day. It is also the story of God’s calling us to be loving, helpful and generous. For us to continue to be this vital place of worship, a beacon of light on the hill, a sanctuary of great music and poetry, art and prayer, I ask you now to respond to that call with your own loving generosity.

I hope you will join me in making a considered, prayerful financial pledge to the Waterbury Congregational Church for 2025. Please fill out the pledge card below and return it by Sunday, November 10. Your generosity will make a tangible difference in our ability to maintain this beautiful place of worship, to maintain our worship hopes and to continue to be a golden light of hope in our community. Your support is deeply appreciated.

Love,
Peter

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

In response to the privilege and great joy of bearing witness to God’s ever-renewing love for all of creation, I/we intend to give this offering in support of the ministry of the Waterbury Congregational Church, UCC during the next fiscal year, January 1, 2025 to December 31, 2025.

Amount to be given: $__________________ 口 Weekly / 口 Monthly / 口 Other _

Name:_____________________ Email address:__________________

口 Please contact me about giving a pledge to the church through distribution of an investment account.

Signature:

Autocracy and Poverty by Timothy Snyder

I find Timothy Snyder so very clear about the issues facing us as a constitutional democracy. This post seemed so good I thought I’d do the unusual and republish it, with his permission of course. It is not just about the election, but about two things we talk about all the time: democracy, or honest conversation, and poverty. There is good reason why Christianity needs to be unshackled from it’s anti-rational, purely revelatory basis to which it has long been held and be subject to argument from all sides, and this article makes one case.

Autocracy and Poverty by Timothy Snyder

Trump and Vance bring them together

Read on Substack

Christianity 101: Continuing the Conversation

For the past thirty years at least, this church has offered to our older youth a chance to gather as a cohort and talk in serious ways about the faith they’ve been raised in since children. This confirmation class was usually confirmed in the spring and became ‘full-members’ of the church.

The Covid-19 pandemic put an early end to our last class. Since then, our cohort of 6 – 9th graders has shrunk and confirmation as we once did it, seems less fitting to our situation. In the spirit of turning a problem into an opportunity I am proposing a new way of ‘doing confirmation.’

Last month, after worship, and continuing on the second Sunday of each month until spring, I have invited our confirmation age (late middle school to early high-school age) to participate in a conversation I’m calling, “Christianity 101: Continuing the Conversation.”

Here’s the thing: I invite you too to be a part of the conversation! Our second meeting is this Sunday, following worship and a cup of coffee. We meet on the third floor.

I have always felt that the main point of confirmation was not indoctrination but in-conversation. To be in conversation about the great questions, to be in conversation about the reality of our deepest and most important longings and and how these things matter to our everyday lives with inquiring minds, has always been the most exciting and gratifying part of confirmation. But why limit it (and with our small cohort, that conversation would likely be limited)? Why not invite all of you to join us in the conversation, either sporadically or regularly? Why should we not all learn from each other? And experience the joy of faith-filled conversations?

I hope you will join us for this new adventure. My promise is that the conversation will wrap up by one hour (I hope that promise gets harder and harder to keep as our comfortability with the setting and each other in it increases!). And I promise to come ready to get the conversation rolling with a few introductory comments, questions, ideas. Those comments and questions might be related to issues previously raised, to themes related to the calendar, to the morning’s worship service, etc.

Bronson Alcott once wrote a book about teaching faith to children. In a different address, he talks about the joys of conversation as part of the deep, but simple need of human life: “Human life is a very simple matter. Breath, bread, health, a hearthstone, a fountain, fruits, a few garden seeds and room to plant them in, a wife and children, a friend or two of either sex, conversation, neighbours, and a task life-long given from within — these are contentment and a great estate. On these gifts follow all others, all graces dance attendance, all beauties, beatitudes, mortals can desire and know.”