We're tremendously excited that Valentine's Date Night is back again this year!  Last year we raised over $12,000 for the McFarland Community Food Pantry through "Bucky and Lena Get Hitched,"  a musical staged in our sanctuary with actors from McFarland, Stoughton, and the Madison area.  

This year's sequel is a vow renewal - Bucky & Lena 2:  Lutefisk and Lies.  You know you don't want to miss it! You can find all the details at mcfarlanducc.org/valentine. Reservations are now open for the weekends before and after Valentine's Day.  If you are interested in serving as a host or contributing to the dessert reception at intermission, please contact the church office at 838-9322, or check the church's Mission & Service group on Facebook.

On Sunday, January 15 in worship we blessed individuals going to Washington DC over inauguration weekend to witness to our Gospel values, where they joined others holding forth a vision of a more just and generous world for all people.  Below is the online journal of several MUCC members who participated in the Listening & Witnessing trip: Kristin Gorton, Joan Jacobsen, and Maddie Loss.  

Want to see more pictures and stories?  Visit facebook.com/mcfarlanducc.  

And if you're curious about the ministry trip as a whole, CLICK HERE to learn more
​from the United Church of Christ.

The bus is packed and ready for the trip to D.C. with the Wisconsin Conference United Church of Christ.

#tellthestory  #bethechurch

MORNING: We arrived in the Washington DC area just after midnight yesterday.  Today dawns with a quiet morning of reflection and prayer.  This afternoon our sisters and brothers at Emmaus UCC will be hosting us for a day of sacred conversations around issues of interfaith and inter-race engagement.  An inter-religious worship service...and...of course...a community meal, will end the day.

You are invited with us in this digital sacred place to experience God's transformative love.  Blessings this day, and in the months and years ahead. You are a beloved child of God.

This morning's moment of faith included a scavenger hunt for copies of We the People posters.

MID-DAY:  An afternoon in community.  Reflecting on the faith tools we carry as followers of Jesus... tools that can transform.  Food. Community. Christ.

#loveoverfear
#Godisstillspeaking

We have spent the day talking and listening and learning.  The day ends with a shared worship with 6 different faith communities.  Praying for Peace and Understanding.

Visit facebook.com/mcfarlanducc to see more!

This past week was a busy one!  We began the season of Advent by handing out gift bags to the congregation on the first Sunday of Advent for them to decorate.  In a twist on the traditional Advent calendar, in which you open a door or package to receive a gift, we asked people to set something aside instead - selecting one of three local food pantries to receive the food items they placed in their gift bags.  During Advent, we heard from representatives of the McFarland Community Food Pantry, the AIDS Resource Center, and the McFarland High School Pride Pantry.  In the days leading up to Christmas (and for those who traveled, a little afterward), we brought the gifts to the front of the sanctuary.  They were blessed in worship on January 8th. The result was over 40 bags of food and essentials delivered to three wonderful community organizations:

One of McFarland UCC’s participants in the
​‘Listening & Witnessing in Washington DC’ Mission Trip, January 19-21 2017. ​

(an edited version of her 1/8/2017 mission moment)

I’ve been coming to a United Church of Christ congregation for as long as I can remember. It’s what I know. I’ve gone through confirmation and other activities within the church. This church drew me to the General Synod in Cleveland, Ohio. This trip was where I became so enthralled with the United Church of Christ’s mission. The constant call for social justice. The daily grind to ensure that the world is a more just and loving world for all people. I was able to witness these moments of faith. The excitement when the supreme court ruled on the right for LGBTQ couples to marry, the sorrow filled moments in remembering the Charleston shooting, and the calls to action found on the plenary floor. I fell in love with the message. The message of extravagant acceptance and widespread love. Where no single person is left behind or forgotten or devalued. The message of loving all people regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, gender expression, sexual orientation, or religion.

I grew up hearing messages from the church that have shaped who I am as a person. That all were created in God’s image. That whoever you are and wherever you are on God’s journey, you are welcome. That all are blessed to be a blessing. And that ALL are welcome at God’s table. These messages. These messages pack all that this Church is about. These are all ideas that I witnessed as I was growing up that became such a constant part of my life. These are the messages that I heard in a setting that was loving and accepting. I desperately wish that all people can hear these messages for if the words are heard they can make the world a little softer and little more loving. It is a type of love that continues to lead my life today. And in these past few months I have formed my concept of the church leaving the building and heading to college.

College is complex. Because while it is believed that one pursues a degree, it is for yourself. But it is actually all about Him. You go to college to learn how to love God and His children better. Love His children regardless of their race, age, gender expression, sexual orientation, religion, or gender.

I went to college expecting that the majority of people that I met would believe the same and be aspiring to the same knowledge. That love and acceptance lived loudly. I was devastated to discover that this approach that I saw in the actions United Church of Christ and represented to myself was not widely accepted. I found myself participating in a campus ministry where other students rejected this idea just as firmly as the UCC embraces it. I felt like I had to transform my identity as a Christian to be viewed as a Christian among my peers in this group. Do I continue down the path that I belong on, a path of love and acceptance that my life has been shaped by? Or do I turn away from my prior identity to conform with this new group that I stumbled upon? Thankful for my decision to read “Let Your Life Speak” by Parker J Palmer I came across this paragraph. It was my involvement in this group that “made me feel inadequate to the tasks of living my own life, creating guilt about the distance between who I was and who I felt I was supposed to be.” And living these two lives left me exhausted and frustrated. But after I faced myself with this question the decision was an easy one. I made a choice that reflected who I had been, am, and always will be. But I was disappointed that I was even presented with this type of decision. I was hurt. Because as I moved through this process my country was moving through an election where some feel that they had not been the offered love and acceptance that they deserved.

After the election I listened to other new friends that I have met that are Jewish and Muslim. Friends that are sent flyers from Christian organizations on campus that preach about how the only way of saving the world is have everyone convert to Christianity. How this generation was going to fix the world by leading everyone to the one true savior. A belief that frightens my friends that are not Christian. My dear friend would question, trying to figure out where these actions come from. She would ask me, “But aren't you a Christian too?”. And I would respond with, “Yes, I am, but … I don’t believe that stuff. I believe all are equal, and that all can coexist, and that all are welcome in the world”. And this “but” made me even more confused. For the frustration of having to defend my own beliefs in response to other beliefs of Christians wasn’t something that I had exactly experienced before. And this reasoning wasn't enough and will never be a enough for members of the Islamic or Jewish faith. The faiths that believe in the same God, come from the same father, Abraham. And after a few weeks of school these excuses were not enough. Because I saw daily fear and knew I had to do something more. For my beliefs, the beliefs of love and acceptance have constructed who I am. And to see others so comfortable with rejecting this one core belief of my own God was brought out feelings that I cannot put into words.

After the election I witnessed the fear of females who are survivors of sexual assault. Women that attend school at a university where one in four of the undergraduates experience sexual assault. Women that live in a country where the general populace elected a man who brags of sexual assault. Terrified that the rhetoric of the election will come to normalize what they have survived. I watched as my friend moved through the process of receiving the justice for what she had gone through. The process of fighting the uphill battle and the heartbreaking realities in her life that she struggled to comprehend. And as things continued to stack up against her, she asked me if she could go to church with me. The hope that my religion of love and acceptance was prevailing over all of the voices that were shogun at her. She heard the calm beckoning of love and acceptance. Love and acceptance where even the most fragile could find solace in a vesper service on a cold, Sunday afternoon.
​
These experiences are just scratching the surface. And I am forever grateful that I followed the life that I was meant to live. I felt that I finally found my true being in these moments of tenderness and hurting and joy by striving to live through all that I was taught as a young girl. And now this is a continued version of the church leaving the building and heading to the streets. It first started by leaving to go to high school, then to college, and now to Washington DC.

Sunday, November 27, we celebrated a new way of experiencing Advent: 

What’s a preacher to do when the scripture for the day – several weeks in a row - cuts a little too close to what’s going on in the world?  The same thing one does any other Sunday:  preach the text.  Preach the Gospel. We are people of faith.  And if we shy away from our sacred stories because they bear an uncomfortable word, then we are no better than the king who fed a scroll bearing forty years’ worth of prophetic words into the flames.
 
This is the Word the Spirit has brought to the church this day:  a perilous time, when the nation is under threat.  The Prophet Jeremiah under house arrest, confined, prevented from gathering with God’s people. God’s word snatched from Baruch’s hand - and in a section we skipped over for length today - God’s prophets had to go into hiding.  The scroll with these holy, subversive words taken to the palace and read in private quarters amid the king’s closest advisers, and then deliberately, section by section, consigned to the fire.  Burned because the king did not like what he was hearing.  Because he wanted to suppress the message being spread by the prophet.
 
What we have in today’s scripture is tantamount to a book burning.  We’re not talking about a single speech here. We are talking about a scroll containing forty years of Jeremiah’s life’s work - his heart and soul, everything God had given him for the good of the nation of Israel, the shining days and the terrible days and everything in between.  A masterwork, destroyed.
 
It would be easy, after such a disaster, to give up. It would be natural — particularly for Jeremiah, who was already prone to depression, and lived in difficult times — to give in to the inner voice of doom.  To stand there in judgment, shaking one’s head, saying, “I told you so.”  Worse: to entertain fantasies of revenge, as if salvation is to be found there. 
 
But the prophet doesn’t give up, although it would have been so easy to do so.   Instead, he stayed rooted in his call, offering us a model of faithful resistance to a world that just wants to get back to normal when it’s everything but business as usual:  
 
First, the prophet speaks the word given by God.  Over and over again, the prophet spoke the words.  Sometimes it offended people.  But he kept going.   Then, the prophet passes the word on to others, so they are equipped to share it.  When Jeremiah couldn’t go himself, Jeremiah taught Baruch.  Baruch wrote it down so it could be shared.  And Baruch spoke it in the temple. 
 
And then - I love this part - when the powers of this world try to shut down the transmission of God’s word (because when does that ever work, people?) - the prophet steps up again.  This is when God germinates the seeds of the Word that are planted in the weary heart of the prophet, and it cracks wide open again.  You may think you have seen it all and done it all and by all that is holy you are tired, but the word of the Lord comes to you and here it comes again:
 
“Write down all the words that were in the first scroll that was burned.”

Write down all of the words...and more.   The scroll was burned.  The powerful ones shut it down.  Has the message been lost? No. Just delayed. Write the revised and expanded edition, God says.[1] They're not going to like hearing this one any better, but it’s still worth saying.  Justice is justice. Write it. Speak it.  Send My Word forth, instructs God — so the prophet continues to raise the uncomfortable questions before the nation as a whole, not neglecting to confront the powerful, not neglecting to speak in the public square:
 
Do you treat each other justly? Do you follow the Lord’s ways?
Stop taking advantage of the immigrant, orphan, or widow.
Stop shedding the blood of the innocent,…
going after other gods to your own ruin…[2]
 
And are you caring for God’s creation?
 
“I will weep and wail for the mountains,
and lament for the grazing lands in the wilderness.
They are dried up and deserted;
no sound of the flocks is heard;
no sign of birds or animals is seen;
all have vanished.”[3]
 
Are the rich and powerful growing fat and sleek,
prospering, indifferent to the plight of the orphan, the rights of the poor?[4]
 
From the least to the greatest, all are eager to profit.
From prophet to priest, all trade in falsehood.
they treat the wound of my people as if were nothing:
“All is well, all is well,” they insist, when in fact nothing is well.”[5]
 
Do you treat the worker with justice?
And do you allow room, in your economic life
for rest, as God commanded?[6]
 
And to whom do you give supremacy?
 
“The Lord is the true God!
He’s the living God and the everlasting King!”[7]
 
“God made the earth by his might;
he shaped the world by his wisdom,
crafted the skies by his knowledge.”[8]
 
“Stop at the crossroads and look around; ask for the ancient paths. 
Where is the good way? Then walk in it.”[9]
 
It is words such as these the prophet carried to the nation, which had him banned from the temple, confined, his words burned, and eventually killed in exile.  It is words such as these which Jesus used to confront the powers of his time, words that got him killed.
 
Today is Reign of Christ Sunday, when we remember who rules supreme.  When we remember the kingdom - or kindom - to which we belong.   
 
We are in the middle of a challenging time in the life of our nation, and a challenging run of texts from the Hebrew Prophets, to be followed by a challenging run of texts about the imminent arrival of Jesus, Emmanuel, God-With-Us.  We may come to church looking for comfort.  But the comfort in the Gospel is inseparable from its challenge, inseparable from Christ’s claim upon our lives. 
 
Our Christian life leads from font, to table, to cross:  We baptized a baby last week, and set her on the road to discipleship.  Remember all the things we said about the water:  water is washing, and soothing, and slaking thirst, and drowning.  It is death and it is life.  Remember all the things we say at the communion table:  it is a meal, where we nourish our bodies, where we celebrate the great banquet where none are excluded, where there is always enough, and it is also a funeral meal, where we remember that it is a gift offered to those Christ already knows will abandon him before he dies.  Even the first resurrection story is filled with challenge, more than comfort.
 
King Jehoiakim wants to enjoy his comfortable winter chambers by the firepit.  The nation would like it very much if things could get back to normal.  It’s a lovely dream; but that’s all “normal” ever was, a dream.  Because “comfort” was only comfortable for some, and “peace” only “peace” for some.  To abandon them for our own comfort is to abandon the Gospel.
 
Prophets, attend!  We have been given a Word for our time.  Though there may be those in our nation who say, "Hush! Your Word disturbs our peace," and urge us to quiet ourselves, we are called to proclaim it again, more boldly.  
 
For here is the way our God works: never settling for a retread of the past, but going beyond, calling us to speak and work for the revised, expansive vision of human community, a community ruled according to kindness, justice, and righteousness.
 
“I am the Lord who acts with kindness,
justice, and righteousness 
in the world,
and I delight in these things,
declares the Lord.”[10]
 
God is writing the revised and expansive edition.

​It’s gonna take a while. There’s still time to get involved.  Prophets, are you in?
 
Amen.

If you took home an orange box to Trick or Treat for UNICEF or would like to contribute to our church gift to UNICEF, please bring in your contribution the first week of November; there's a quick turnaround time to pass them along as part of the annual UNICEF campaign.

Dear Covenant Partners and Friends of McFarland UCC,

It was great to see so many of you at worship on September 18 to participate in the transition from Kristin Gorton, our Interim Pastor, back to Pastor Kerri Parker, who returned from a three-month sabbatical.  Many thanks and blessings to Pastor Kris for the wonderful work she did in Pastor Kerri's absence!
 
While things are back to a "routine", our sabbatical work is not done!  It is time for us to reflect on what we learned - Pastor Kerri as a pastor and we as a congregation - during the sabbatical.  You are invited to a 

Post-Sabbatical Visioning Session following worship on Sunday, November 6.
We expect this session to last 2-3 hours.  Lunch will be provided,
​and we will be done in plenty of time for you to make the Packer’s 3:25 kickoff!

No pastor, no matter how gifted, no matter how called to this work, has ever exhibited the skill of being in multiple places at once.  No matter how many science fiction fandoms I claim, no one has yet presented me with a functional transporter technology, and the Doctor’s TARDIS has yet to show up at my door.  
Which is a real shame, because like many pastors, I am in the habit of leaving for any meeting pretty darn close to the time I should be arriving at the meeting.  Pro tip:  driving anywhere takes time, especially if you’re taking the Beltline. 

I suspect that I share this dilemma with more than a few of you.   Despite our attempts to fit an increased number of tasks into our week, the clock stubbornly remains limited to one hundred and sixty eight hours.  We have to pick and choose how to spend our time - and energy.  Like everyone else on this planet, we are finite human beings, with a finite ability to keep going.  When the unexpected happens, something always has to give.  Sometimes it’s our health.  Sometimes it’s our intended priorities.  When we juggle too many projects, we forget things, or experience frustrating delays in getting back to things we know are important.   

True confessions:  pastors are humans too.  Sometimes we never get to the personal visit we intend to make. Sometimes we compose a carefully worded email instead of making a phone call, or fire off a less-carefully worded email at odd hours.  

This being a long way of saying, although I have never been a passionate fan of the Apostle Paul, as a pastor, I find myself inclined to offer him more grace than I once was.  He was the Energizer Bunny of pastors, with thousands of miles traveled by foot and more by sea.  

Since he couldn’t be in all these places at once, he had to be creative about staying in touch.  Not having email or telephone available to him, he would have to rely on updates carried by travelers – sometimes personal conversations, and sometimes letters.  There would be a substantial delay in receiving the news.
In the way of grapevine conversations everywhere, what he learned may not have been good or accurate news.  Is it any wonder that Paul’s most common type of writing was the cranky pastor letter? ​