2/2/25 Weekly Messenger
- treasurer593
- Mar 14
- 8 min read
Hancock UCC Weekly Messenger for February 2, 2025
Come, Spirit, come, our hearts control, Our spirits long to be made whole. Let inward love guide every deed; By this we worship, and are freed.
Pastor TJ is on family leave in Wisconsin. Even though we miss her, we are very grateful for those who have stepped up to cover for her while she is away.
Our guest ministers this Sunday will be Rev. Dr. Kate Winters and Rev. Joel Krueger.
Thank you Kate and Joel.
Our guest ministers, Kate and Joel, are two years retired from The First Church in Belfast. They are members of The United Christian Church in Lincolnville Center. Joel now works as a potter and spends much time volunteering for environmental groups. Kate, an educator, writer, and avid knitter, is thinking of writing a book on spiritual life in Maine.
During the month of February, we will be receiving the One Great Hour of Sharing offering. OGHS provides sources of clean water, food, education, health care, small business micro-credit loans, advocacy, resettlement for refugees and displaced persons, emergency relief and rehabilitation as well as disaster preparedness and response. Every little bit helps!
Sunday we will share Holy Communion. For those who will receive the sacraments at home, please prepare a piece of bread or a cracker, and a cup of juice or wine and join us at the table. Also, we will be receiving non-perishable food items, toiletries, and pet food for the Loaves and Fishes Food Pantry as we do on the first Sunday of every month.
Our meetings are open to all. If you would like to attend a meeting, please let Vicky know and she will provide the Zoom link, or you are welcome to attend in person. Our meetings are held in person and virtually on Zoom.
The Outreach Committee will meet Thursday, February 13 at 4:15 pm
Deacons will meet on Friday, February 14 at 3:00 pm
Christian Education will meet Sunday, February 16, after Worship at 11:15 am
Council will meet on Friday, February 21 at 12:30 pm
Join us for lightly guided meditation at 9:00 a.m. on Fridays in our Sanctuary. All are welcome!
Next Sunday, February 9th, after church, Brandy Brooks will provide training on when and how to administer Narcan. Those who attend will be provided with both Narcan and educational resources.
February and March tentative Supply Clergy
February 2 – Rev. Dr. Kate Winters & Rev. Joel Krueger
February 9 – Sarina Brooks, Student Ministry Intern
February 16 – Rev. Dr. Kate Winters & Rev. Joel Krueger
February 23 – Sarina Brooks, Student Ministry Intern (Sarina’s last official day with us)
March 2 – Rev. Cynthia Priem
March 9 – Rev. Dr. Kate Winters & Rev. Joel Krueger
March16 – Rev. Nancy Johnston
March 23 – Rev. Dr. Kate Winters & Rev. Joel Krueger
March 30 – Rev. Cynthia Priem
Hancock Grammar School is looking for mitten and glove donations for
children ages 5 to 10. If you have any to donate, please bring them into the office or you may drop them off at Nurse Mary’s office at the school.
February Birthdays and Anniversaries
02: Lucy Ashmore 03: Roberta Scott 03: Liz Awalt 08: Cynthia Johnston 08: Miranda Devenish 09: Phil Devenish
10: Jack Hirschenhofer 10: Ethan Hunt 12: Xyerra Harriman
13: Amy Philio 15: David Stratton 16: Will Stephenson
18: Sara Beth Denoncourt 21: Pat Summerer 24: Heath Hudson
25: Michael Hodgdon 27: Antonio Blasi
Please keep the following people in your prayers this week:
Prayers for Pastor TJ, her dad, Don, mother, Carol, and her siblings. Prayers Peggy Karns; and Mary Shannon-Riley. Prayers for Donald B.; Kenny V.; Orrick; Brian; and Jane of Golden Acres. Prayers for Judith C.; Eleanor A.; Ira; Don and Heather; Bruce’s sister Lynn; Sally’s friend, Sue Barger; Herbie Lounder; Ruth; Marie; Jim Snyder; Jonathan Holmes; John Wood; Sue Davies; Sue Davenport; Liz & Jim; Kenny Stratton & Joy & David & Lori & Melissa; Debbie & Lincoln & son-in-law Aaron, daughter Ashley, and granddaughter Brielle; Sandy Phippen; Amy Nickerson; Kevin and Vanessa & family. Prayers of strength and healing for all awaiting diagnoses and for all recovering from surgeries & procedures. Prayers for all that are unsafe, unhoused, hungry & in need of care & compassion. Prayers for all caregivers; those who are grieving; and prayers for all that is in your heart…
Handy Woman for Hire!
Personal care; Food preparation and cooking; Shopping;
Gardening; Interior and Exterior Painting
Contact Lori Stratton
From the Maine Conference, United Church of Christ
A Letter from Rev. Dr. Malcolm Himschoot Dean, Maine School of Ministry
What Bonhoeffer Reveals
When it came out in the fall, I encouraged MESOM students to see the film Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin. It is a political movie – concerning historical events in 1930s Germany. But it is also a theological movie. If it were not, Dietrich Bonhoeffer would not have spent the bulk of his ministry preaching, writing, and teaching in theological education in the church. The theological questions raised throughout the film are relevant to Bonhoeffer’s writings and those of Bishop Martin Niemoller, who felt the church should not belong to, nor owe loyalty to, one political party. These are relevant issues for the church in every age.
Granted, to invoke Nazi Germany is a fractious thing to do right now in America. The film was released into such a controversy that few people saw it. Many mistook the film for an unrelated book with a similar-sounding name. (Said book was written by alt-right influencer Eric Metaxas, who has proposed but has yet to make a movie. If it comes to exist I don’t know what it will be called, but I feel sure it will distort Bonhoeffer’s legacy in a dangerously authoritarian direction. This is not that movie.) Is the movie Bonhoeffer accurate in every detail? No. It takes the story of a studious person who wrote 32 books and tries to make him come across as an action movie hero! i It both romanticizes and oversells his part in armed resistance against the Third Reich. The final portion of the film glorifies one moment of struggle, whereas Dietrich would have been the first to say that no single moment is either decisive or heroic.
Nevertheless, the bulk of this movie is important. It depicts civilian processes representing millions of daily choice points whether to strengthen or corrode sacred values, to collude with or expose white racism, and how to express Christian faith. It is rare that the drama of civic and ecclesial life makes it onto a big screen! Here is one scene that makes the film worthwhile. Not content to sit through a worship service where a very loud clergyperson rallies German white nationalism and signals blatant support for Hitler’s agenda, young pastor Dietrich leaves the sanctuary, followed out by an older bishop. The bishop says to the disapproving young pastor something like, “Don’t get too loud in your critique. The church mustn’t get political.” To which Dietrich responds, “Listen to that applause. The church already has.”
What is the proper relationship of the church to the state?
On January 21st, 2025 President Trump heard a sermon by the Right Rev. Mariann Budde during a worship service in the capacious National Cathedral. Instead of grandstanding, Budde put to him a direct question. In essence: Will you have mercy on those who need mercy? The content of her petition was scriptural. To be merciful is named by Jesus as a quality of God in his teaching of the Beatitudes. One would hope in a democracy not to have to beseech, but even Budde’s delivery was biblical, invoking an ancient plea before kings. Unimpressed with the bishop’s moral if monarchical gesture, Trump tweeted in indignation that she and her church should apologize. Critics throughout the country began targeting this mainline Episcopalian leader, saying she was out of line. Even sitting legislators in the House of Representatives, who otherwise presumably would support the First Amendment, held a vote to condemn her message.
In her preaching, should Budde have refrained from being ‘political’?
Just the day before, on Inauguration Day, the president had welcomed several Christian clergymen to an elite gathering in the Rotunda. Along with state dignitaries and several billionaires representing major US corporations, the administration invited two Catholic priests, two elders in the LDS church, an evangelical preacher, a rabbi, and a Pentecostal pastor, even though this political event was not a worship service. Several of these male religious leaders spoke at the microphone, lending an aura of divine authority to the ceremony, invoking divine favor and even divine protection for a particular political figure. Yet none of these leaders quoted Jesus as Budde did.
Exploitation, cruelty, hierarchy, and hypocritical moralism are the hallmarks of no religion Jesus espoused. There are problems whenever a partisan agenda co-opts religion, free from accountability, posing with legitimacy. Robert Jones, whose online journalism continues where his book White Too Long left off, analyzes this moment with alarm. He notes that the administration’s new Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is an open white nationalist parading symbols of Christianity.
If carried out with the favor or the silence of clergy, does that mean sins are Christian?
Religious violence in America is far from unprecedented. Settler genocide, slavery, manifest destiny, imperialism, the KKK, segregationism, and anti-immigrant nativism have all been political efforts endorsed and blessed by church leaders. Past waves of racialized state violence undertook their own misguided book bans, misogyny, and suppression of civil liberties. Even after the church learned to confess these particular sins, norms and systems for abuse remained, secularized and persistent. Yet meanwhile throughout this country’s history, struggles for abolition and civil rights, for peace and the social gospel, for gender justice and economic resiliency, also drew on resources of the Christian faith – often paired with passion for democracy. The history of churches, as Bonhoeffer’s story makes clear, is replete with tensions, multiple altar calls, and opportunities for repentance.
To oppose extremism in American institutions from the presidency to legislatures, courts, and branches of the military, requires at least removing the veneer of religious authority embedding church and state together in crimes against humanity. For Christians this is a moment for spiritual confession, returning to the core of faith: God revealed in the humble hospitality of one hungry for justice, open to the sufferings of each wounded person, in and through one’s neighbor able to transform hatred into love.
Bonhoeffer was a writer, teacher, and organizer within the ecclesial processes of Germany’s churches, who would have had Christians make their confession long before Hitler ever reached the power he did. Confession recognizes the presence of God throughout life, the devotion due only to Jesus, and the fact that we are complicit in the present.
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i Fortress Press has released a 17-volume set of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s complete works.
CARING FOR THE VULNERABLE IN OUR MIDST
As your Conference Minister, I am committed to provide information to you in any way I can, to offer support for your churches and faith settings, and to be a conversation partner as we witness a new age that denies the rights of vulnerable dear ones among us, and as we contemplate our response to such injustice.
Here are some resources:
Webinar from Heather Kimmel, recorded for anyone who wishes to view and gain legal knowledge: https://www.insuranceboard.org/safety-central/online-learning/
May we ask our God to grant us the love and courage to speak and act as Jesus modeled speaking and acting on behalf of the vulnerable, shunned, and marginalized siblings among us.
Blessings on all, Marisa
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