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• New Years Day
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• 12/11/2011
• 12/04/2011

The Tie - click for on-line version.  

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Pastor Jeff has signed on to become a “Still Speaking Voice,” which means that he has voluntarily chosen to be an ambassador of the GOD IS STILL SPEAKING (GISS) outreach and identity project, and of the United Church of Christ at large. His goal is to have at least 10% of our average Sunday worship attendance (12-13 people) also become Still Speaking voices. Please sign up at http://www.ucc.org/god-is-still-speaking.  It is easy, important, and (best of all) you get free stuff!

       

 

God has a sense of humor. This is something that many of us forget. Not that we ourselves are totally to blame – the Church (meaning the whole of the community which seeks to find its identity in Christ in all times and places) has not often made God's humor and playfulness clear. 
For reasons of control, and due to spiritual and emotional unbalances and social injustices, many church leaders through the ages have been unable 
to communicate God's joy and levity to their flocks. 

      In addition to this, many of us grew up in homes with families who themselves were – as I like to say – “humor challenged.” The mere suggestion that God may have been playfully larking about when creating the platypus, the stars, or even us, would appear as a severe affront in such homes. And yet, since we know (even those of us who are “humor-challenged”) that we are created in God's image, we can deduce that our own human sense of playfulness, joy and humor, imply a wholly greater sense of the same things on God's part. 

    Read as a spiritual account of God's creative work – one that can inform and expand upon our valuable scientific knowledge on cosmology and the 
beginnings and development of life on earth – Genesis 1 provides us with some deep insights into God's being. In Genesis 1:2 we are told that “darkness
was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters” (NIV). The word translated “hovering” can also imply “fluttering,” 
or “relaxing.” In the moments before God's Word goes forth to create, there is a deep abiding joy, a lack of tension, a peace in simple being. 

        So often in life we lack this peace ourselves, and therefore do not allow ourselves to experience the spiritual and temporal space that will allow 
laughter and joy and peace to come into our lives. We deny ourselves the right to enjoy our Godendowed capacity to laugh at ourselves and our condition, 
and to find the comfort we can share with one another by sharing in this laughter. Sometimes we do this out of insecurity, and sometimes, unfortunately, 
it is due to a emotional or psychological pathology. Either way, however, with the help of God, and perhaps other skilled people in the helping vocations,
we can overcome these self-imposed limitations. 
    

        It is my greatest hope that 2012 will be a year of laughter, and joy and peace at CUCC, a year with only creative tension, rather than destructive
tension, and a year marked by a deepening of relationships among ourselves, with others, and most importantly with God in Christ Jesus. Let us through 
the guidance and fellowship of the Holy Spirit make it so. 

Yours in Abiding Joy, 

   

Pastor Jeff