This is one of the most beautiful services of the church year.  The children will bring in the greens to decorate the church during the Prelude, and they, along with members of the Search Committee, will light the Advent candle of Hope.  We will sing three  classic and beloved Advent carols, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” “Wake, Awake for Night Is Flying,” and “Watchman, Tell Us of the Night.”  We will sing a Benediction set to the oldest Advent tune, a plainchant that has been sung daily during Advent in monasteries for over a thousand years.  We will hear scriptures with a message of hope and teachings on how to live in hope.  

The choir will sing an Advent hymn from Spain as the introit, “Toda la Tierra (All Earth Is Waiting).” They will sing “Ah! Think Not the Lord Delayeth” as the Anthem with a text by one of the great hymnodists of the early 20th Century, Percy Dearmer, set to a J.B.König tune.  Organist John Atwood will play three pieces from the Baroque era, one by Johann Sebastian Bach and the other two by his cousin, J. G. Walther.

Here are two of the organ pieces, starting with a Walther chorale prelude based on the hymn “Wake, Awake for Night Is Flying.”  The second is the Advent piece by J.S. Bach that John will play as the Postlude.

This is one of the biggest Sundays in the church year–Thanksgiving, Reign of Christ Sunday, the last Sunday in the season of Pentecost, and New Year’s Eve–the new church year begins next Sunday, the 27th, with the First Sunday of Advent.  In addition, this week we will be celebrating the Wild Game Supper (still tickets available, click here), and the highly successful Church World Service Kit drive of our Board of Mission and Social Action, and the completion of a program on God and Family by Cub Scout Caleb Peters.  To top it all off, we will have a warned Congregational Meeting immediately following worship to consider whether to go forward with a study of what it would mean to become an Open and Affirming congregation.

This is one of those Sundays that has an evocative sound track–all many of us need to do is hear “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come,” or “We Gather Together,” or “Now Thank We All Our God,” and we feel an old familiar Thanksgiving feeling come over us, and memories of people and meals come flooding back.  We will hear all three this Sunday, plus a Reign of Christ hymn, “Now Is the Time Approaching” (sung to the exuberant tune of “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus”), plus the beloved “Fairest Lord Jesus” sung by the choir.   Organist John Atwood will play pieces by J. S. Bach (hear it below), William Selby and H. Clough-Leighter. Continue reading Upcoming Service Notes for November 20, 2016, Thanksgiving & Reign of Christ →

Advent begins on Sunday, November 27th.  It is a season of preparation in the church year, and to many it is the most beautiful, spiritually rich and moving of them all.  It is full of candles and greens and children’s wonder and excitement.  It focuses on hope, peace, joy and love. It turns our hearts toward the light that shines in the darkness.  Advent hymns and sacred music convey a mix of quiet longing and eager anticipation, as powerful in their own way as the awe and jubilation of Christmas music.

Advent is intended to help us pause and savor the quiet darkness, and help us open our hearts wide to prepare for the choirs of angels that will come singing their glorias to celebrate the birth of the light of the world.  Advent teaches us how transformative it is simply to wait and watch and pray.

The problem is that our secular society races in the opposite direction.   Continue reading Upcoming Service Notes for November 6, 2016, Advent Preparation Sunday →

This Saturday, the 28th, we will hold a workshop in the church that will talk about the role of church leaders in difficult or anxious times. One of the principles of that leadership is that “We recognize that Beginning Again is a Way of Life – that we believe in the resurrection – that new life comes.”  We tend to think of the 1500s on Reformation Sunday, and we tend to think of the departed on All Saints Day, but they are both important reminders that God is a reforming, reconciling and resurrecting force at work in our lives today, and saints are all around us right now, and we ourselves are saints when we open to that force and let it work through us.

Beginning again is at the heart of Christ’s way in part because it is human nature to stray or fall. There has never been a saint who did not need to pick herself back up and begin again from time to time–in fact for most of us, many times a day!  Also, change is the nature of life, it is a constant, so the community of saints needs to be reforming and reconciling itself and resurrecting constantly, beginning afresh in response to change within or around it.

We will celebrate past, present and future reformations and saints this Sunday. Continue reading Upcoming Service Notes for October 30, 2016, Reformation, Reconciliation and All Saints Day Sunday →

The first hymn this Sunday will combine two old favorite traditions, the words of the 84th Psalm and the tune of the Christmas carol, “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming.”  We will have read the Psalm responsively before we sing, addressing these words to God: “How lovely is your dwelling place…. A day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere.”  The church is called the house of God and the body of Christ, so on one level the Psalm is talking about how calming and comforting it can feel to be in our beautiful sanctuary. Jesus said that the realm of God is also within us, and Paul said that our bodies are temples, so on another level, the Psalm is talking about how lovely it is to sink into the presence of the Spirit within us and trust and rest in it because our true self is as beautiful and full of love and peace as any sanctuary.

Continue reading Upcoming Service Note for October 23, 2016 →

This Sunday the lectionary readings remind us to persevere in our struggle to make this world more like the realm of God’s mercy, justice and peace.  We will hear the beautiful promises of Psalm 121:

I lift up my eyes to the hills– from where will my help come?
My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth.
He will not let your foot be moved;
he who keeps you will not slumber.
He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep…

We will hear Jesus tell the story of the widow who would not stop knocking on the door of a cold-hearted, unjust judge until he relented. Jesus said, “Will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them?” (Luke 18:1-8)

We will be taking our annual Neighbors in Need offering, joining our small congregation’s contribution to a much greater united force that is knocking on the door of a cold-hearted world persisting in its pursuit of justice. The theme this year is: “This we believe…No child should go to bed hungry.” The Silent Meditation in the bulletin tells us that “Nearly one in five children…16 million…in America live in households that struggle to put food on the table.”

We have a long way to go in this and so many other dreams and callings from the Holy Spirit, including ones we have for our church or our families or our own life. The words and music of this service are meant to inspire us to keep on with our efforts for a better life and a better world.   Continue reading Upcoming Service Notes for October 16, 2016, Neighbors in Need Sunday →

The Silent Meditation in the bulletin this Sunday is from our former neighbor in the Upper Valley, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, who said,  “Joy is the most essential Christian emotion. Duty calls only when gratitude fails to prompt.”  We do not have to look far for sources of gratitude and joy.  We are surrounded by a gloriously colorful fall steadily unfolding under deep blue October skies.  We have a loving congregation full of people with diverse gifts and talents who are helping us worship and serve in a variety of ways.  We have children in the church who are eager to participate, and not just in refreshments!  (Please remember to bring colorful leaves for them this Sunday for the Burning Bush they will be creating in Sunday School!)

And yet we also have around us plenty of reasons to despair, plenty of opportunities for discouragement or resentment.  We see people around us who are not grateful and not joyous.  Sometimes we ourselves slip into negativity.  The scriptures and hymns this Sunday remind us to have faith and to live our faith as a path to well-being, gratitude and joy.   The question in a life of faith is, what does our gratitude or our joy prompt us to do now for God and for our neighbor?  Continue reading Upcoming Service Notes for October 9, 2016 →

President Abraham Lincoln said, “I care not for a man’s religion whose dog or cat is not the better for it.”  Our religion is meant to change the way we live for the better both in the smallest of ways that would affect our dog or cat and in the biggest of ways that affect the lives of our family, our neighbors, our church, our community, our nation and our world.  How we live this life matters.

How we respond to suffering especially matters, both our own suffering and the suffering of others.  As Bishop Desmond Tutu and his daughter Mpho write in this Sunday’s Silent Meditation, “Transformation begins in you, wherever you are, whatever has happened, however you are suffering. Transformation is always possible…. We are not responsible for what breaks us, but we can be responsible for what puts us back together again. ”

You can read more about the service and listen to some of its deeply moving music in the rest of this brief article. Continue reading Upcoming Service Notes, September 25, 2016 →

We will hear one of the most fascinating and puzzling passages in the gospel this Sunday (Luke 16:1-13). Jesus tells a story about a dishonest manager who cheats the rich man he works for, who then praises the manager for his shrewdness.  Jesus shocks us by telling us to be as shrewd ourselves.  It seems to make no sense until we delve into it and find practical wisdom that we desperately need right now in our church and world.  We will hear two other passages about the kind of wisdom Christ calls us to have, one from Proverbs 8 and the other from Matthew, Chapter 10, verses 16-20.

Our music will draw from very diverse traditions this week from Gregorian plainsong to Christian folk rock.   Continue reading Upcoming Service Notes, September 18, 2016 →