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    • Sunday service - Holy Communion December 28, 2025 at 9:30 am – 11:00 am Grace Church 215 Pleasant Street, Sheldon, VT Website: www.gracechurchsheldon.comTime:  09:30 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)        Every week on Sun.Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us02web.zoom.us/j/83929911344?pwd=alZQTWZMN0ZkWFFPS1hmNjNkZkU2UT09Meeting ID: 839 2991 1344Password: Call for detailsOne tap mobile+13126266799,,83929911344#,,1#,816603# US (Chicago)+19294362866,,83929911344#,,1#,816603# US (New York)Dial by your location        +1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago)        +1 929 436 2866 US (New York)Meeting ID:…
    • Sunday service - Morning Prayer January 4, 2026 at 9:30 am – 11:00 am Grace Church 215 Pleasant Street, Sheldon, VT Website: www.gracechurchsheldon.comTime:  09:30 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)        Every week on Sun.Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us02web.zoom.us/j/83929911344?pwd=alZQTWZMN0ZkWFFPS1hmNjNkZkU2UT09Meeting ID: 839 2991 1344Password: Call for detailsOne tap mobile+13126266799,,83929911344#,,1#,816603# US (Chicago)+19294362866,,83929911344#,,1#,816603# US (New York)Dial by your location        +1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago)        +1 929 436 2866 US (New York)Meeting ID:…
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Lent 2B February 28, 2021

Posted on February 28, 2021 by Beth Crane

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
Psalm 22:22-30
Romans 4:13-25
Mark 8:31-38

In our first reading today, we meet Abram and Sarai, who will become Abraham and Sarah. Abraham is a shining example of someone who has deep and abiding faith in God. God is telling Abraham and Sarah that God is going to make Abraham and Sarah the parents of  “a multitude of nations.” Abraham is 99 and Sarah is not far behind him in age, yet God is making this covenant with them. They will have as many descendants as the number of grains of sand on the beach or the number of stars in the sky.

Frederick Buechner is a Presbyterian minister and writer who lives in southern Vermont. Here is his description of Abraham and Sarah. “They had quite a life, the old pair. Years before. they had gotten off to a good start in Mesopotamia. They had a nice house in the suburbs with a two-car garage and color TV and a barbecue pit. They had a room all fixed up for when the babies started coming. With their health and each other and their families behind them they had what is known as a future. Sarah got her clothes at Bonwit’s, did volunteer work at the hospital, was a member of the League of Women Voters. Abraham was pulling down an excellent salary for a young man, plus generous fringe benefits and an enlightened retirement plan. And then they got religion, or religion got them, and Abraham was convinced that what God wanted them to do was pull up stakes and head out for Canaan where God promised that he would make Abraham the father of a great nation which would in turn be a blessing to all nations and that’s where their troubles started.

“They put their house on the market and gave the color TV to the hospital and got a good price for the crib and bassinet because they had never been used and were as good as new….

“So off they went in their station wagon with a U-Haul behind and a handful of friends and relations, who, if they didn’t share Abraham’s religious convictions, decided to hitch their wagon to his star anyway.

(Buechner, Telling the truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, pp. 50-51.)

Abraham and Sarah lived in Ur of the  Chaldeans, which is now a city in southern Iraq. The distance from Ur to Canaan is 3,461 miles. Abraham and Sara had no idea where they were going. God told them God would lead them there, and they trusted God. Think of starting on a journey to an unknown land and trusting God to help us find the way. That is real faith. Think of packing everything into a U-Haul and driving into the unknown. Think of packing everything onto camels or donkeys. Abraham and Sarah had deep faith. And, since we know the ending, we know that they persevered to the end. Sarah had a son, Isaac.

The other example of faith I would like to share today is Eric Liddell. In Holy Women, Holy Men and A Great Cloud of Witnesses, his commemoration date is February 22. Eric was born to Scottish missionaries in China in 1902. He and his older  brother Rob, were sent to a school for the children of missionaries in London. In school and later at the University of Edinburgh, Eric was a champion runner and rugby prayer. He was also an excellent student and a person of deep faith. On their leaves from missionary work, his family lived in Scotland, and the film Chariots of Fire portrays Eric running fleet-footed in the Scottish highlands.

In the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, Eric was slated to run the 100 meter race and was strongly favored to win the gold medal. After arriving in Paris, Eric was told that the race was scheduled for a Sunday. Because he strongly believed in the observance of the Sabbath, Eric refused to run the race. He ran the 400 meter race and won the gold medal. He also ran the 200 meter and won a bronze medal behind two American runners.

After his graduation from Edinburgh, Eric returned to the area in China where he had been born and served as a missionary from 1925 to 1943. In 1932, he was ordained a minister in the Congregational Union of Scotland. Because of conflict between China and Japan, the missionaries suffered many hardships. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the British government advised all British citizens to leave the country. Eric’s wife, Florence, who was from Canada, took their three children and went to be near her parents.

Eric and his brother Rob stayed on and continued their work. In 1943 Eric was interned in the Japanese concentration camp in Weihsein. This camp held 1,800 people from many allied countries under terrible conditions. Holy Women, Holy Men tells us that Eric won the trust of his captors so that he could go around the camp and minister to his fellow prisoners. He died shortly before the camp’s liberation on August 17, 1945. He was 43 years old.

We have Abraham and Sarah and so many other people of deep faith, On Tuesday, we remembered Polycarp, a faithful and gentle Bishop who was burned at the stake. On Wednesday, Matthias, who replaced Judas as an apostle, on Thursday,  John Roberts, a priest who worked with First Nation people in Wyoming. We are all on a journey of faith, and thank God for all the holy examples of people we have to guide us. We are all taking up our cross, trying, with God’s grace, to follow our Lord Jesus in the way of the Cross, the Way of Love.

We can think of Abraham and Sarah, traveling all those miles without a road map, GPS, cars, or airplanes. We can think of Eric Liddell, a champion athlete in sport, and a champion of faith, doing all he could do to comfort his fellow prisoners who were suffering under inhumane conditions. And all the saints of God who have shared God’s love and hope with others over all these centuries. We are part of that great cloud of witnesses. And we love and support each other. Through this wilderness journey we have stayed together and prayed together and encouraged each other. And in the midst of us, often out ahead us leading us, is Jesus, our Good Shepherd, making sure we stay on track, nourishing us with his presence, protecting us so that we can share the good news of his love.  Amen.

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Lent 2A March 8, 2020

Posted on March 8, 2020 by Beth Crane

Genesis 12:1-4a
Psalm 121
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
John 3:1-17

Our first reading today is so short, yet it says so much. Abram, later renamed Abraham, is one of the greatest examples of faith in all of the Bible. He lives in Ur of the Chaldeans, in a region which in those days was called Mesopotamia, on the bank of the Euphrates River, about 225 miles southeast of present-day Baghdad, Iraq. It is about 1600 years before the birth of Christ. 

God is calling Abram to make a journey far away from everything and everyone that he knows. Abram has a comfortable life and many possessions. Yet he packs everything up and goes on a journey.

That is what we are doing this Lent. We are going on a journey to grow closer to God. We are going on a journey to become more and more the persons God calls us to be.

Our psalm for today is one of my favorites, and, I think it may be one of your as well. It speaks of the hills, and we can think of our beloved Green Mountains and all the smaller hills that we love. This psalm reminds us that God is with us every moment of our lives. God watches over us. For those of us who are reading The Restoration, this psalm reminds us of Step One, remembering that God is everywhere and God is always with us.

In our gospel for today, we have the encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus. Nicodemus is a member of the Sanhedrin, the ruling council of Judah. This is a group of extremely powerful men who make decisions that govern the religious and community life of the people. As a member of the Council, Nicodemus is familiar with the ways of worldly power.

Nicodemus has been hearing about Jesus and he may even have seen our Lord from a distance or heard him speak. In any case, Nicodemus has reached the point where he simply must go and talk with Jesus. But if he goes in the daytime, people will see him and this could cause great trouble for him. He could lose his place on the Council, and he could lose his life for associating with this powerful teacher who is a threat to those in power.

So, Nicodemus goes to see Jesus under cover of night. Nicodemus gets right to the point. He says that Jesus must come from God because of his teachings and his healings.

But then Jesus makes a spiritual quantum leap. He tells Nicodemus that we can’t see the kingdom of God without being born from above.

Poor Nicodemus is overwhelmed by this, and he takes it in a concrete sense, thinking that we will all have to go back into our mothers’ wombs and be born again. Then Jesus says that we have to be born of water and Spirit. For us, this is a clear reference to Baptism.

Nicodemus is still trying to figure all of this out. “How can these things be?” he asks with some frustration. Jesus refers to the time when poisonous snakes were biting and killing God’s people in the desert and God ordered Moses to hold up a statue of a serpent, which cured the people of the snake bites. and prevented them from dying. This is also a reference to the cross. And then our Lord says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

We do not meet Nicodemus again until after Jesus has been crucified. According to John’s gospel, Joseph of Arimathea asks Pilate’s permission to take Jesus’ body down from the cross and bury it in his own tomb. Nicodemus comes with spices to anoint the beloved body  of our lord. Both men are members of the Council, and both are risking their lives.

We can imagine that Nicodemus never forgot his meeting with Jesus. that he meditated on their conversation and grew in his understanding of who Jesus really was.

Abraham’s journey was both earthly and spiritual. He traveled hundreds of miles to a new land, always trusting in God’s promise that in Abraham all the families of earth would be blessed. The journey of Nicodemus was not geographical but spiritual.

Every day he would go to his work on the Sanhedrin. He would watch as a kangaroo court found Jesus guilty and as an angry mob demanded his death. As far as we know, he had only one close, face to face meeting with Jesus, but every day he grew closer and closer to our Lord, until the time came when his love for Jesus told him that he had to help his colleague Joseph of Arimathea take care of our Lord’s body no matter what that action might cost. He and Joseph were not able to save Jesus, but they felt compelled to give his precious body a decent burial.

Abraham went on a journey into the unknown with complete trust that God would lead him in the right direction. Nicodemus had the courage to go and meet with Jesus, and after that, his life was never the same. He grew closer and closer to Jesus. He grew to love Jesus so much that he joined Joseph in carrying out the most intimate and loving act of washing and anointing Jesus’ body for burial.

Lent is a journey. God’s people journeyed for forty years in the desert. Jesus fasted and prayed for forty days in the wilderness. We journey together to grow closer to God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Closer to realizing that God is always with us, leading and guiding us, forgiving us. feeding us, giving us the grace to take the next step, the next leap of faith, the next quantum leap into the loving heart of God. Amen.

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