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The UCC Advent Devotional for December 18, 2014:

"You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” Matthew 3:1-12

Church, can I confess something? I think I might hate the week before Christmas. Because at C-minus one week, all I can see is the wrath to come.

It is the wrath of express shipping on extra candle drip protectors, and office parties that make an audit seem painless by comparison.

It is the wrath of frantic and unpleasant shopping trips that leave me kicking myself for sleeping in on Black Friday … again.

The birth of Jesus in Bethlehem’s stable is a wonderfully celebrative event. That is as it should be. It is what Christmas is all about. But I fear we have domesticated it and sanitized it way too much. We celebrate the Nativity with angels singing, shepherds kneeling, cattle lowing, Magi coming, Handel’s music playing, and on and on. One of my favorite hymns has a verse: ‘The cattle were lowing, the poor baby wakes, but little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.’ What kind of a baby is that? Thus Jesus was born? Or so we think.

December brings us the season of Advent, when we are invited for four weeks before Christmas to live into a pregnant waiting, a time of reversals, an anticipation of the unknown, and a joyful preparation for the coming of the One who offers us a new perspective on life, a new way of being. Madeline L’Engle reminds us:

“It is the irrational season, When love blooms bright and wild.
Had Mary been filled with reason, There’d have been no room for the child.”

First appeared in November/December 2012 issue of Open Door magazine.

The UCC Advent Devotional for November 30, 2014:

“Then they will see 'the Son of Man coming in clouds' with great power and glory. But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.  And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.” Mark 13:24-37

As we gather with family and friends this Thanksgiving, a prayer for the feast, for the gathering, for life itself, undergirded by God’s mercy and grace, is certainly appropriate … yea even required! Here are some prayers, gleaned from several sources, that might be helpful.

November ushers in a season of bright orange pumpkins, steaming cups of tea, brisk frosty mornings, and cozy evenings by the fire. It is the month we celebrate our American tradition of Thanksgiving, which has its roots in Hebrew scriptural practices offering God the “first fruits” of our harvests. We honor God whose creativity and grace has given us these gifts. We are to remember with gratitude that life itself is a gift from God. Gratitude is at the center of a healthy spiritual life, growing out of the awareness that we are all the offspring of God’s wellspring.

Here in New England, October offers us great beauty—the brilliant colors of the autumn leaves, the crisp morning air, the scent of apple cider, the sound of geese overhead as they fly to a winter destination. We are reminded in a compelling way that change is a way of life, that a truly engaged life includes countless endings and beginnings, letting go to make room for new experience.

On August 24, 2014, Old South Church's Youth Leader, seminarian Kate Rogers, traveled to Missouri to hand deliver 1000 peace cranes to our our sister UCC congregation near Ferguson which has been ministering so amazingly in the midst of chaos, tensions, and grief. The cranes were given to Old South Church last year by Newtown Congregational Church following the Marathon tragedies. As of August, they have traveled over 2200 miles over the last two years.

Dear Pastor Traci and the Saints of Christ the King:

As we enter summer, most of us hope to find a more spacious life in which we can take time for recreation or release from patterns of overwork and over scheduling that have become habitual in our lives. Yet unless we create this reality, that hope will have passed us by when September arrives. Might we create time for Sabbath somewhere in our week during these summer months?