Saugatuck Congregational Church, UCC
©Rev. Alison J. Buttrick Patton
May 17, 2015

Scripture: John 17:6-21

Jesus was down on his knees.  Time was running short:  he’d shared his last meal with his followers, washed their feet, delivered his final sermon.  Soon, he would be arrested and led away to die.  But first, he had one more prayer to pray, one more appeal to God – not for himself, but for those he was about to leave behind.  Like a teacher on graduation day, he regarded his disciples, students of the Way, the ones in whom he and God had placed all their hopes, and he wondered:  “Have I said enough?  Have I said it often enough?  Clearly enough?  Do they really get it?  What will happen, after I’m gone?” Continue reading →

Saugatuck Congregational Church, UCC
©Rev. Alison J. Buttrick Patton
May 10, 2015

Scripture: John 15:9-17

What kind of fruit will not spoil?  Fruit, by its very nature, is delicate, transient.  Precious because it will not last:  find a perfect peach in July, sun ripened and juicy, and you’d best eat it right away; savor the juices as they run down your chin; fill up your mouth with the honey sweet pulp.  Tomorrow, it will turn mealy and brown, infested by fruit flies and no good for anything but the compost pile.  Go raspberry picking in September:  fill up your trays with those oh-so-delicate, ripe, red berries and get ready for a feeding frenzy: eat them on oatmeal; in English trifle, in smoothies, on salads, or mixed with cream.  For days you feast on the tender/juicy fruit, in a race to consume all the sweetness before the berries turn to mush.  There’s no saving them ‘til next Tuesday, or until the Sunday after next when you have guests coming to dinner – as lovely as it would be to share the fruit of your harvest.  Oh, no: best to throw a raspberry feast right now or not at all.  Fresh fruit does not last.

So what could Jesus possibly have meant, when he directed his followers to bear fruit that will last?  What kind of fruit did he have in mind?  Continue reading →

Saugatuck Congregational Church, UCC
©Rev. Alison J. Buttrick Patton
May 3, 2015

Scripture: Acts 8:26-39

The photo on this morning’s bulletin cover makes me smile every time I look at it.  I see grace in that photo – and joy – and warmth between two people who might be strangers or friends – or strangers-just-becoming-friends.  It’s hard to know who reached out first: the man on the bench, or the person just outside the frame of the picture.  Is the man with the tousled white hair greeting someone, or being greeted?  Receiving assistance, or offering encouragement?  Does it matter?  Either way, the exchange clearly gives the man pleasure.  His face lights up, as the two of them grasp hands, closing the distance between them.  I can only imagine that the person on the other side of that hand is smiling, too.
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Saugatuck Congregational Church, UCC
© Rev. Alison J. Buttrick Patton
April 25, 2015

Scriptures:  Psalm 23 and John 10:11-18

Fierce and Tender Shepherd: train our ears to hear you, and our hearts to follow you, when you call our names.  Amen.

So here’s my confession:  Good Shepherd Sunday has never been my favorite Sunday.  I know the image of the Good Shepherd is much cherished by many faithful Christians, perhaps by many of you:  What more beloved psalm will you find than the 23^rd Psalm?  And what more ubiquitous image than Jesus as the tender shepherd, most often posed with a lamb cradled in his arms or hoisted on his shoulder?  How many of us grew up in churches adorned with bucolic images of a gentle, long-haired man (often a decidedly non-Arabic looking man, with honey colored hair and blue-green eyes), robed in white and walking sandal-foot through the green grass, a cluster of fluffy, white sheep gathered around his ankles? These are among the most popular images of Jesus, loved by many. But I read verses like the ones in the Gospel of John, which Art read for us today, and it makes me want to write a follow up to Michael Hendricks’ sermon of a few weeks back, which he titled, “Why God is not my King.”  Part II:  Why Christ is not my Shepherd.
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Saugatuck Congregational Church, UCC
© Alexander P. Floyd Marshall
April 19, 2015

Scripture: Acts 3:1-19

In the church where I grew up, a mid-sized evangelical Bible church just outside of Memphis, we took communion by passing a plate of crackers and those trays with the little shot-glasses of grape juice down each row of seats.

We also, like most evangelical churches, put an especial emphasis on personal conversion: the choice of “salvation.”

When I was a young child, the most striking thing I gathered from the stories I heard about older people’s journeys to that choice was that, it seemed to me, when you “were saved” you were supposed to feel really different because something had really dramatically changed inside you. Some of the adults I heard tell their stories really had been dramatically saved from things like addiction, but as a six-year old I didn’t really comprehend that: I just understood that whatever this salvation thing was, it was “different” feeling. And anyway, the real benefit of being an “official Christian,” in my six-year-old head, was that it meant I got to eat the little crackers and drink the juice on the first Sunday of every month when we took communion.

For a while after I decided to “accept Jesus” for myself, I did feel different, probably because so many adults in our church went out of their way to congratulate this little six-year-old “new believer.” But after a while the feeling faded and I started to have some doubts about whether or not it had really worked.
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Saugatuck Congregational Church, UCC
©Alexander P. Floyd Marshall
March 15, 2015

Imagine with me for a moment that we went about living our whole lives trapped in a cave.

Not the opening line you were expecting?

No really, imagine with me for a moment that we live in a cave where we are trapped and all around us shadow puppets are being cast on the walls. They take the shape of all kinds of creatures: birds, dogs, elephants. But having never been outside our cave, nor even knowing where these shadow puppets come from or what is causing them, we have no way of knowing what the shapes they represent are, so we are forced to make up explanations of our own, such as: the shadows are alive.
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