First Congregational Church
Your Road to Redemption
Who walked the road with Jesus?
(Posted March 2, 2023)
In conversion you are not attached primarily to an order, nor to an institution, nor a movement, nor a set of beliefs, nor a code of action - you are attached primarily to a Person, and secondarily to these other things.&--E. Stanley Jones, pastor
Have you ever had the experience of meeting someone who is so engaging and so brilliant that the encounter immediately makes you want to talk to them some more?
Possibly they aren’t of the same religious background you are, but even so it makes you want to spend more time talking to them, to learn how they perceive the Truth. So imagine this: What if you were someone prominent in your religious community, to the extent that absolutely everyone looked up to you?
Church Services on Sunday
In-Person Service begins at 10 a.m. Facemasks are optional if you are fully vaccinated.
Watch us on Facebook: We livestream our services to Facebook. You may view them live or on demand at www.Facebook.com/DanburyChurch/videos.
Your First Step on the Road to Redemption
Chances are, if you truly, really needed to talk to that brilliant someone again, you’d do it --- but perhaps it would be late at night, in private, when no one else could see you.
That’s what Israel’s High Priest Nicodemus did when, after meeting Jesus and hearing him talk about being “born again,” he just had to find out for himself. He came in the dead of night to learn how something that sounded physically impossible could possibly be real.
That’s the nature of our Lenten series this year. The Road to Redemption is a rocky one,but Jesus doesn’t travel it alone. We’re right there with him, seeing his presence in our lives.
Meet the People Who Walked the Road to Redemption with Jesus
From the Second Sunday in Lent onward, Jesus chooses a companion, an average person in which he performs incredible transformations. All of these people are like us: flawed, uncertain, challenged by tragedy.
The ‘Born Again’ Thing
Our Journey to Calvary and ultimately to Easter Sunday this year will be our own, affirming Road to Redemption. This week we journey with Nicodemus. The late, great theologian Frederick Buechner, who departed life last August, wrote about Nicodemus and his confusion about how one becomes born again:
”Nicodemus said… just how were you supposed to pull a thing like that off? How especially were you supposed to pull it off if you were pushing sixty-five? How did you get born again when it was a challenge just to get out of bed in the morning? He even got a little sarcastic. Could one ‘enter a second time into the mother's womb?’ he asked (John 3:4), when it was all one could do to enter a taxi without the driver's coming around to give him a shove from behind?...A gust of wind happened to whistle down the chimney at that point, making the dying embers burst into flame, and Jesus said being born again was like that. It wasn't something you did. The wind did it. The Spirit did it. It was something that happened, for God's sake.”
If you, too, like Nicodemus wonder about that “born again” thing, join us this Sunday at 10 in person or via Facebook when we take a few more steps with Jesus on the Road to Redemption.
Well's Bells: Salvation, Healing, Hope
He rang the bells within her, and she left that day, joyfully proclaiming that she had met the Messiah.
(Posted March 10, 2023)
“In one drop of water are found all the secrets of all the oceans.” — Kahlil Gibran, poet
A couple of days ago I had to meet one of my doctors for an appointment at the nearest place he maintains an office. It’s a major cancer treatment facility, and while he’s primarily an oncologist, he also treats people like me for other non-cancerous disorders.
Whenever I go to this facility, there is some period of time when I’m in the waiting room with all of the other patients. Each of them, I realize, is fighting some kind of major battle far greater than my own. Each is being quietly brave while reaching out in hope. An automated grand piano always plays very softly in the corner of the waiting room, filling the empty air with something other than worry.
Church Services on Sunday
In-Person Service begins at 10 a.m. Facemasks are optional if you are fully vaccinated.
Watch us on Facebook: We livestream our services to Facebook. You may view them live or on demand at www.Facebook.com/DanburyChurch/videos.
A Bell Celebrates a Conquered Challenge
The best sound I heard, however, happened when I was walking out at the end of the appointment. It took me right past the chemotherapy suite. Just at that moment, bells rang out joyfully all over, because at that moment another cancer patient had just completed her last chemo. She reached up and yanked on the rope, over and over. Those clanging bells washed over all of us with a wave of hope and spilled into the waiting room.
That’s when it occurred to me. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the bells around us rang out whenever we defeated the challenges we face quietly in our lives? You know the kind of challenges I mean: The ones we didn’t create ourselves, but which life hands us, just because of who we are.
The Challenge for the Woman at the Well
This Sunday’s Gospel brings us face-to-face with a woman drawing water at the well at noontime. What’s significant about this is that no self-respecting woman would ever go to the well mid-day when she might encounter the men of the village. And no Jewish man would ever speak to a woman in public, especially one he didn’t know. This tells us something about what people in the town thought of people like her.
But the woman chose that particular hour, and there she met a thirsty Jesus asking her for a drink. The fact that he even talked to her – a lowly woman – was a surprise for the first people reading this Gospel.
Well’s Bells: Salvation, Healing and Hope
The challenge for her was first, her gender, and then her reputation. But the thirsty Man at the well was the one who looked into her soul, saw where sin had infected it, and offered her “Living Water” to cleanse it. In other words, salvation, healing and hope.
He rang the bells within her, and she left that day, joyfully proclaiming that she had met the Messiah.
Join us this Sunday to learn how Jesus reached out to the women of his day and continues to touch the souls of all of us -- women and men -- despite all our challenges.
Judgement or Grace?
Judgements that fail to see the miracle in front of us.
(Posted March 16, 2022)
“In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.” -
- Blaise Pascal, philosopher, and mathematician
There’s a good reason that for most of us, outside of the Lord’s Prayer the one other prayer we can recall, even if only in part, is the 23rd Psalm: “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want…” I think that’s because it captures the close, touchable, earthbound way that Jesus cares for us.
The Good Shepherd that he is, Jesus is not beneath picking up us “tired lambs” and carrying us, touching us and tending to the wounds we’ve received from the brambles of this thorny life.
Church Services on Sunday
In-Person Service begins at 10 a.m. Facemasks are optional if you are fully vaccinated.
Watch us on Facebook: We livestream our services to Facebook. You may view them live or on demand at www.Facebook.com/DanburyChurch/videos.
Grace Restores Sight
In a profound way, we see this same touchable Spirit in this Sunday’s gospel. Jesus comes upon yet another blind man in his travel, but this man does not ask for a healing. His disciples immediately come up with a question that was based on the prevailing belief of the day, that anyone who had an affliction was that way because they had sinned, and they deserved their punishment.
Who sinned… This man or his parents? Jesus certainly had a lesson to teach the disciples right then and there. So he took some earth from the ground, combined it with spit, and applied it to the man’s sightless eyes. He told him to go wash in the nearby pool. When the man did so, his sight was restored.
‘Blind’ Judgment
This would be enough of a lesson for the disciples and the rest of us. But there were more lessons to learn about how we humans can be so hard-headed in our judgments that we don’t even recognize the miracles in front of us.
Upon seeing this now-sighted man, his neighbors couldn’t believe it was him. He was simply more of a disability than a human being. Later on, when the Pharisees questioned him about the healing, they turned this miracle moment into an accusation against Jesus. They said Jesus had violated their precious Law by healing the man on the Sabbath. They were, in every sense of the word, blind to the Light of Jesus, who was acting not out of the Law, but out of love.
Touched and Healed by Grace
We see too much of this kind of thing in our own time – too many clergy and their followers so anxious to proclaim their righteous beliefs that they condemn people who worship God differently from them, or love differently from them. It’s all about judgment, and so little about Grace.
This Sunday, we will follow The Shepherd down the pasture to the valley, where we, too, will allow him to touch us and heal us. Come join us on this Jazz Sunday.
Information
First Congregational Church
164 Deer Hill Ave.
Danbury, CT 06810
Est. 1696
Phone: (203) 744-6177
Email: office@danburychurch.org
Office Hours:
Monday 9 a.m. – 3 p.m.
Tuesday 9 a.m. – 3 p.m.
Wednesday 9 a.m. – 3 p.m.
Thursday 9 a.m. – 3 p.m.
Friday 9 a.m. – 3 p.m.
Thrift Shop Hours:
Saturday 10 a.m. - 2 p.m.
Sunday Worship:
Sunday 10:00 a.m.–11 a.m.