The Eliot Church of Newton, UCC

474 Centre Street
Newton, MA 02458

a Newton address
a city church

Welcome to all our neighbors! Watertown, Newtonville,
Oak Square, Newton Corner, W. Newton, Nonantum, Brighton and Newton Centre!

We regret that we have closed the building to public meetings and events for the foreseeable future.
Please look here for all developments and for spiritual support.

Song, Word and Prayer
February 28, 2021

The Judean desert where Jesus walked.

Image by Gidon Pico from Pixabay

The Beatitudes of Jesus are God’s promises to us. During this particular Lenten season of 2021, we are counting on those promises more than ever after a year of pandemic that stole 500,000 American lives and trashed the economy, after a year of distress over the police killing of George Floyd, after another year of heedless planetary degradation.

So, Jesus says to the disciples, “Blessed are the meek [gentle], for they shall inherit the earth.” Inherit the earth? What did he mean by that? What could he have possibly meant, given that he was speaking straight to the earth’s disinherited? Sounds less like a promise and more like of the same old counsel to wait, be patient, karma will catch up with the robber barons. But is that really it?

During this second Sunday in Lent of 2021, we will listen for the answer in the book, “Jesus and the Disinherited,” by the Rev. Howard Thurman, noted African-American public intellectual and theologian, Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University (1953-65) when Martin Luther King was a student there. Thurman’s special insight was, Jesus counsels resistance without turning over the keys to your inner life. We seem to have gone from placebo to paradox here, but Thurman has something for both blacks and whites to learn from. Come, listen.

From last Sunday's sermon, 2/21/2021

The Kingdom of Heaven is...

when we choose to look for it - in the trust of a familiar hand we hold, in the first crocus that heralds the coming of spring, the meal cooked for us or by us, in the needle of vaccine in our arms, and in the patience to wait our turn.

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