Thanks to your talented Senior Minister for inviting me here today.  It is a privilege to bring greetings from the entire United Church of Christ family, both here in Connecticut and around the world.  We are grateful for your strong support through the years, your generous OCWM (Our Church’s Wider Mission) and other financial support to the mission of the UCC, and for consistently sharing your gifted clergy with the wider church since your early days.  

As the Interim Conference Minister, it is my task to be a bridge to the future of the Connecticut Conference.  Building on the strong foundation of my predecessor, Dr. Davida Foy Crabtree, who like her predecessors served the churches of Connecticut with dedication and conviction, I am charged with preparing the Conference for the future.  In that effort, we are studying every aspect of our life together in order to determine the kind of Conference Minister who should be called for these next years of challenge and change.  After worship, and at any other time you wish, I welcome your insights, concerns and dreams for the future of our conference. 

You recall Babylon, the place to which the Israelites had been exiled after a brutal military defeat.  500 years before Jesus, Babylon was a powerful city-state of ancient Mesopotamia- modern day Iraq.  Babylon was bent on dominating Jerusalem and as much of what we now call the Holy Land as possible. Babylon understood that the  region was an economic and political prize with its fertile Jordan River valley- the Land of Milk and Honey - and its access to the Mediterranean Sea.  

In Babylon, God’s people yearned for their homeland.  Their preached that God was punishing them for a faith gone flabby.  They had not stood up in the face of injustice.  They had failed to keep the Sabbath.  They had slipped into comfort-seeking, turning away from the cries of the poor.  Civility and charity were forgotten.  The Israelites self-centered instead of God-centered. After a time in Babylon, the people wake-up and vow to return to the Law and the prophets..  But as their exile continued one dreary day after another, the people succumbed to despair.  Has God forsaken us forever? they moan. 

‘Sound familiar?   Did the unspeakable tragedy in Tucson last week open our eyes to how and where we have been living?  It seems so!  At least for a time, we forgot our mean-spirited, harsh political rhetoric and prayed together. We began to hear the word, civility again.  The President spoke about treating one another more kindly and we found ourselves doing just that, even in traffic jams and on snow-clogged commutes.  We began to think about neighbors and co-workers, reaching out to them in kindly ways. 

As a society, we have been living in exile from our best selves, defeated by our old enemies of greed and ego and self-centeredness and materialism? Faced with impossible problems on Wall Street and Main Street, we elected an able new leader.  It is not mean as a partisan political comment to note that two years later, we vilified him for his attempts to save the economy and bring justice to health care. We wrote him off for failing to accomplish what generations of his predecessors failed to do. In our rush to judgment, we abandoned constructive criticism.  We caved in to fear and impatience.  Worse yet, we demonized folks who disagreed with us, treating them as enemies.  I can no longer even speak to a long-time friend because she views my politics as representing absolute evil.  Our society now engages in gridiron politics, seeing only winners and losers, enemies and friends.  Words like compromise and cooperation and collaboration disappeared from our vocabulary.  Worst of all, many wrote-off the faith of our forebears, casting it aside as irrelevant or juvenile.

Our true home is the place of our ultimate Truth; the felt presence of the One to whom we owe our very existence, and the gifts of each breath, hour, sunrise and sunset- the framework of the days of life, given one at a time. We are home is that moment in time in which we know our true vocation. 

The Hebrews knew it when the prophet put it into words. Second Isaiah declares to the exiles,

The Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb he named me…And said to me, “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be gloried.” I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach  to the ends of the earth… 

There it is! There is the Call, the Vocation the people are to take on for the rest of their lives!  Their hearts will be nourished with the knowledge that they have a sacred mission, a holy life purpose.  Regrettably, this truth would be distorted in times to come so that the message would become one of exclusivity for a people instead of inclusivity for all people to know and the blessings of faithfulness.  

Five centuries later, the one who became known as John the Baptizer became convinced of his sacred call to help his society recognize God’s Chosen: 

Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! …I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.   

I had some childhood thoughts about becoming a minister but adolescence, I worked diligently to rid myself of them! Then there came a time, on a distant, rainy street, in a foreign soul-land, that I knew what I had to do.  And very moment that I acknowledged that Call, my life’s broken puzzle-pieces fell into place revealing an awe-inspiring sense of how beautiful True Life can be. 

God invites all of us to come in from the cold, to borrow a famous phrase from John LeCarrie’s Cold War thriller  (The Spy Who Came In From the Cold).  Each of us is invited to come in from the cold and pull up a chair by the sacred flame of holy vocation.  No matter what our secular work, our sacred vocation- our Call- is to be the hands and feet and mind of Jesus to this world.  

The Church, this amazing congregation, all congregations, all faith communities, are called from exile to homecoming, from worrying about budgets and bills to welcoming strangers and affirming outcasts.  Following God’s call instead of society’s gods leads to a new life of purposeful risk-taking and joyful engagement.    

The same is true for our Connecticut Conference and our entire United Church of Christ.  In this time of challenge and change for the Church- Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, the UCC still is called to affirm a heritage of service and justice and peace.  We have a sense of God’s extravagant welcome to all.  We have a mandate to preach and teach and live a thoughtful, informed Gospel that reveals a Still Speaking God who has saving power for our world of the 21 Century.   

Listen to a truth-  We are called!  The fire is laid.  The porch light is on.  Home is beckoning just beyond our resistance.  Life is about to begin, not just for us, but through us, to all those who yearn to be set free.    

Thanks be to God!  Amen.