This Week at UPC

This week begins a four-week exploration of the Sermon on the Mount, a collection of Jesus’ sayings. It appears only in the gospel of Matthew in this form; Luke has a similar collection of sayings (including another version of Beatitudes) called the Sermon on the Plain. In Matthew, the sayings are placed at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry and function as the vision statement for his ministry: he lays out a radical vision of what God’s reign on earth might look like, a vision of wholeness for all people. Matthew 5: 1-12 The Beatitudes begin the Sermon on the Mount. They are a series of sentences beginning with the word blessed, or happy in some translations. Blessing is God’s free gift to humankind, a sign of covenant relationship with God. Jesus’ first teaching to the disciples turns a world view on its head. We have learned the ways of the world from our earliest days: that the blessed are the rich, blessed are those with good healthcare and retirement plans, blessed are the powe...

Matthew 4:12-23 This week we are excited to have guest preacher Rick Ufford-Chase with us.  Rick is the co-director of Stony Point Center (with his wife Kitty) and is the PC(USA) Associate for Interfaith Relations, a former moderator of the denomination, and an activist and justice worker, as well as a friend of the congregation. Rick has recently curated and co-written a book called “Faithful Resistance: Gospel Visions in a Time of Empire”, which was the focus of our book study this fall at UPC. The title of his sermon is “Faithful Resistance: Not for the Faint of Heart”. So it’s fair to ask: what are we resisting, and why are we talking about it in church? We are resisting… the culture that is built on consumption and destruction; the vision of the world that puts white Christians at the center; our own tendencies to the call to love, the practices that lead us away from Jesus’ radical vision of God’s reign on earth, a “kingdom of love.” Rick will be with us the whole wee...

Matthew 3:13-17 All four gospels feature the baptism of Jesus, suggesting that Jesus’ baptism seems more critical to any telling of Jesus’ ministry than does a story about his birth. (There are many interesting differences between the different gospel accounts, but the fact that it is in all four is like a big sign pointing to the baptism saying “this is important!”) What made the baptism of Jesus so important? Over the centuries, Christian scholars have filled many pages arguing about just that question. Does it suggest Jesus was impure, and that he needed to “repent” and be cleansed? After all, “repent” was certainly the word John the baptizer used when calling people to baptism. This leads us to the word repent – metanoia in the Greek – and a very common Christian misconception of repentance. Rather than meaning “feeling sorry for doing bad things,” or regret, or confession, metanoia means “go beyond the mind” or “go into the larger mind.” Scholar Cynthia Bourgeault writes tha...