Our 25th Anniversary

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"Wholy Holy" (Marvin Gaye)

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Columbia Memorial Hospital faced the Catskills in the distance and stood just a half mile from the first living room I remember. The apartment possessed only two bedrooms, already too small for my father, mother, two older sisters, and newborn me. In a couple years, when my dad got a better job, we’d move. If child-bearing wasn’t what it was (and remains), I imagine my mom might have walked me home that week. But childbirth, rightly called labor, exhausts thoroughly. And with three kids all under five years of age and with a husband often working, parenthood never stopped exhausting my mother. April 10 th  of 1971 brought unseasonably wintry weather, a pointed, probing wind across the river and our city of the same name. And the alley off of Worth Avenue in downtown Hudson, New York included a steep hill up. My mom didn’t walk me home.   1971, historically speaking, isn’t notorious or notable for things like military or terrorist attacks, political assassinations, or the end...
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Making Sense of a Changed World

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Politically, we are a purplish church. There’s a mix of red and blue here. I don’t know the shade of purple exactly. I don’t monitor how you vote. I don’t look for red and blue. I look at the Jesus in you. Whatever the makeup, Democrats, Republicans, independents unite in Christ here. This to me is a beautiful thing.  That said, for some this Sunday after the election Tuesday is not so beautiful. For some, this election was especially difficult. Some are heartbroken. Really heartbroken.  However, others are heartened. And some are somewhere in between. Knowing this, how would you as a pastor here approach this meditation? How do I speak to these rather different groups of Christians at Plainville Congregational? It’s not so easy. Well, the idea that makes the most sense to me this morning is to do just that, speak both to those feeling heartbroken and to those feeling heartened.  To the heartbroken – your pain is real and difficult. I have no easy answers to give. I have...
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The Garden of the Church & The Wilderness of Politics

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In 1802, President Thomas Jefferson responded to a question  written to him by the Danbury Baptist Association, asking him why he doesn’t “proclaim national days of fasting and thanksiving, as had been done by Washington and Adams before him.” Jefferson in a letter to the Danbury Baptists wrote this: “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.” In the 1644, more than 160 years before Jefferson, Roger Williams, one of the most important early Americans in U.S. history and America’s first Baptist, wrote this in a letter to John Cotton: “When they [the Church] have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broke down the wall itself, removed the ...
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