Christ Memorial United Church of Christ

06/14/2026

Sunday Service: June 14th, 2026

05/31/2026

Sunday Service: May 31st, 2026

05/24/2026

Sunday Service: May 24th, 2026

05/17/2026

Sunday Service: May 17th, 2026

01/26/2026

🕯️🙏🏾 The Rev. Dr. Karen Georgia A. Thompson United Church of Christ General Minister and President/CEO has issued a special statement and prayer following today’s fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minneapolis:

“This is God’s Message: Attend to matters of justice. Set things right between people. Rescue victims from their exploiters. Don’t take advantage of the homeless, the orphans, the widows. Stop the murdering!” (Jeremiah 22:3, MSG)

The peace we long for seems elusive, as we witness the violence in Minneapolis. We are shocked by the murder of Alex Pretti by ICE agents today in the streets of Minneapolis, a mere 17 days after the murder of Renee Nicole Good. We grieve the loss of these lives and pray for their families and loved ones during this time of grief and sorrow.

We pray for the city of Minneapolis, for its leaders and for clergy and spiritual leaders who are offering care to this city that continues to experience the violence, tyranny, and oppression in the presence and actions of ICE agents. We pray for an end to the violence and hatred unleashed on immigrant communities and pray safety for those most vulnerable, even as we pray for those who seek to care for those whose lives are threatened by the presence of these federal agents.

The United Church of Christ joins the faith community in strongly condemning the on-going actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as it continues to bring death and violence to the streets of Minneapolis. The use of lethal force on unarmed and non-threatening individuals continues to result in loss of life and injury. The abduction of people on the streets of major cities, the profiling of individuals, the targeting of immigrants, and the escalation of deportations are violating the human rights of millions. Added to the increased militarization of cities, communities that house some of the most vulnerable now find themselves under siege. It is time to stop the murdering. It is time to stop the violence. It is time to return peace to our nation’s cities.

The deployment of masked agents in the nation’s cities has escalated fear, anxiety, and tension in communities where immigrants and people of color continue to be profiled and targeted to be stopped, detained, and arrested. As people of faith, we call for the removal of ICE from Minneapolis and other cities, and for the removal of the National Guard. We call for truth telling and for accountability in these two deaths, seeking justice for the lives lost, and for those whose lives are disrupted by the actions of ICE.

Today we mourn, weeping at the injustices being meted on neighbors. We mourn the loss of freedom, dignity, and respect. We mourn the loss of these lives.

God, we long for peace in our communities, peace that is promised, peace that is everlasting. We cry out for the loss of lives to violence in the streets of the United States. Grant us the courage to see and speak the truth. Help us to be witnesses to your presence and to the call to love our neighbors as ourselves. Restore peace to the land and to our communities. Set things right among us we pray. Amen.

👉🏾 https://ow.ly/2v8H50Y31Pu

01/18/2026

01/13/2026

Soup for Seniors aged 60 and older at Eisenhower High School! January 21st, 4:30pm til 6pm.

People ages 60 and older are invited to Eisenhower as part of our first Soup for Seniors event!

Our National Honor Society is hosting the event on Wednesday, Jan. 21 from 4:30 to 6 p.m. Please enter through Door S1.

We hope to see you there!

09/21/2025

A NEW MANAGEMENT or LOVE’S FINAL FORM
A Sermon based on Luke 16: 1-13
For Christ Memorial United Church of Christ
Blue Island, Illinois, September 21, 2025
Rev Brian Clary

According to some, this parable is notoriously difficult to interpret. I love it, and believe it could not be more relevant to our time. Two things I believe are always true about the parables of Jesus: (1) They are always about the kingdom of God. (2) They are crafted to make us think. This parable challenges conventional religion, which tends to become moralistic and judgmental. The Gospels tend to point to the Pharisees and scribes representing conventional religion.

The manager is caught in his dishonesty. He is about to be fired. Facing this existential threat, as he understands it, he changes. He turns his life around by changing the primary goal and focus. No longer is his goal the accumulation of wealth by any means necessary. Henceforth, his goal becomes one of survival. To survive, he needs people, and their good will. He needed friends. So, he did what he had to reduce the debts of people who owed the master.The message here, if we understand nothing else, is that while wealth may be important, friends are more important. This recalls the famous Beatles song, With a Little Help From My Friends.

Some readers are troubled by the wealthy man not minding the manager’s writing off debt owed. Isn’t he going to lose money now? I am not bothered for two reasons. First, the text does not say that this man was greedy, only that he was wealthy. It is the manager who was greedy. Second, the wealthy man may not be losing as much money as we might think. The manager apparently had the authority to set the rates of indebtedness to his master. This is how tax collectors operated in Jesus’ day. They charged beyond what Caesar demanded and lived on the margin of overcharge. It was a system that invited corruption. Perhaps the manager had been overcharging much more than he needed to begin with. When John the Baptist is approached by tax collectors in Luke 3 for forgiveness, he tells them simply not to overcharge. 13 “Don’t collect any more than you are required to,” That explain why the tax collectors were so hated, and why the people would welcome this new, radically more generous approach. So, the wealthy man does not necessarily lose money in the new deal.

In speaking of forgiving debtors, this parable brings to mind the Lord’s prayer, “Forgive us our debts, as we for give our debtors.” That is exactly what happened here. When the manager forgave others of their debts, at least in part, he was forgiven of his dishonesty at the same time. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, in The Irony of American History called forgiveness “Love’s final form.” In forgiving our debtors we find a way of loving our neighbors. For those who may be asking, “But where is the repentance here?“ That has already happened. Repentance does not mean words or tears. It means action. It means turning from what one was doing and moving in a different direction. Done and done! Some resist forgiveness, saying it gives permission to bad behavior. Saying”That is okay” is not what it means to forgive. Forgiveness means telling ourselves, even before we speak to the other, “I am going to let this go, to no longer going to hold onto this aggravation. This is not worth it to me.”

I will close with this. There are those who say that for some to win, others have to lose. In this parable, Jesus rejects that as false. The win-lose school of thought contains a lot of suspicious characters in that they often seem to enjoy the suffering of the loser more than the winning. Jesus was familiar with this situation. It was widely and pervasively held in imperial pagan Rome, who invented ex*****on by crucifixion so the powerful could enjoy the suffering of those they had crushed. It was cruel and sadistic. It is why Jesus chose to die on the cross, to show us that suffering and death do not have to be the last word. Jesus had a better way. This parable illustrates what he was talking about in the Lord’s Prayer regarding forgiveness. It show us what the Kingdom of God looks like. In his true repentance, the shrewd manager has trans-formed his predicament from a “win-lose” to a to a ”win-win-win.” The debtors win. Their load is reduced. The manager wins. He has friends he did not have before. Even the wealthy man wins by gaining newfound respect, perhaps even admiration, for the manager’s shrewdness. No one lloses. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

09/14/2025

IN SEARCH FOR A LOST COIN
A Sermon based on Luke 15:1-10,
For Christ Memorial United Church of Christ
Blue Island, Illinois, September 14, 2025
Rev. Brian Clary

Pastor John Robinson in a sermon he preached to the Pilgrims as they were about to depart from Plymouth, England, said this, “The Lord hath yet more truth and light to break forth for His Holy Word;.” I have seen these two parables many times, and even preached on them. Yet, light keeps breaking through.but I have missed a few details. These may enable us to understand how these words written long ago and may even illuminate our lives right here today. This passage begins with “tax collectors and sinners” and ends with “joy.” It is as if the key to finding joy is through associating with tax collectors and sinners, the outcasts of polite society. To map out that route, however, we need to to ask, “Where am I in this parable?”

We may not like the answer here. We are most like the Pharisees. And that is not at all a bad thing. Wha re not outcasts. We are in church. The Pharisees and scribes went to temple and synagogue. We are trying to do the right thing by our country, our families and our children. So too were the scribes and Pharisees. We read scripture. We listen what the good book says. I would argue that the Pharisees took scriptures more seriously than most of us. We try to lead moral and upstanding lives. They tried also. The Pharisees were not bad people. They good people. Just like us. Their only flaw was that they were not as perfect, as as complete as they thought they were. I will speak for myself here, I am not nearly as whole as I would like to think I am. The Pharisees were the religious people of their day, and we, brothers and sisters are the religious people of our day. It would be entirely too easy for us to say, “Well, we are the disciples, of course, and side with Jesus against the Pharisees. Besides, the disciples are not mentioned in these two parables.

The tax collectors and sinners were those devalued by society. Actually, they were hated. That was why Jesus was there. Nowadays, they are the poor and the immigrants, all those who get less respect than Rodney Dangerfield. The burning of food designated to help poor and starving children by our government, was the clearest demonstration of how the poor are reviled. It has ben the most unChristian act by our government since the Wounded Knee Massacre. Both demonstrated contempt and cruelty. Both ate evidence of hatred. The rounding up of immigrants from American businesses and schools and putting them in who are euphemistically call internment “camps” by masked government agents illustrates the meaning of secret police. Laughing at “Alligator Alcatraz” is also hostile, cruel and hateful, andworthy only of shame.
Jesus is always with the outcasts, the ‘ones being “othered.” It is a dangerous place to be. The Good News of Jesus Christ has always been dangerous. As Barbara Harris once said, “We are an Easter people in a Good Friday world. These dangers I\are in even in the parable itself. The shepherd here is not leaving the 99 sheep safely in a gated sheepfold to search of the lost one, he left them in the wilderness, where the the other99 sheep were and increased risk without the shepherd searching for the lost one. That is the risk taking that love requires. Human beings are like sheep, whether we like to admit it or not, curious, distractible, and easily lost without a shepherd.

The question here in these parables, I think, what Jesus wants us to ask ourselves, emerges with the second parable about the lost coin. It is this: “What is your lost coin? ”What are you looking for, what are maybe we all are looking for here that would enable us to take Jesus seriously, to become a serious disciple, not just a nominal one? What is the currency we need to enable us to get farther along in our journey as true disciples of Jesus the Christ? What is the round shield we need to keep hatred from reaching inside us and possessing us, and stop us before we get to cruelty?

I believe the lost coin of our realm is empathy. I have heard people brag about this spiritual poverty. They will say, “I have no empath/compassion for____________.” Fill in the blank, whoever is bing othered, the immigrant, the poor, my personal and or political enemies, people of a different color, anyone who we call “those people”. Empathy is the willingness to imagine how one might feel in someone else’s shoes, in someone else’s life. Empathy requires a willingness to use the imagination God gave us. More than that, however, empathy makes love possible. If we want to follow Jesus and love our neighbors as ourselves, we have to care about him/her. Boasting about a lack of empathy amounts to not only a refusal Jesus, but an invitation to let hatred inside.

Caring about others does not mean knowing how they feel. It means a willingness to imagine how they might feel. We cannot ever really know how another person feels—even if they want to tell us. Some of us are not articulate in talking about how we feel, even those who are articulate are less so under stress. But we could ask. Some preachers will tell you (I have heard this.) that empathy alone is not enough, it is not compassion. True enough. Compassion is empathy plus empowerment to do something for the other. My take is that we are so dangerously short of empathy now or our fellow American, our fellow Christians, our fellow human beings, that compassion does not have anything to work with. We can pray for empowerment, for compassion, but we can give a care now. We can imagine now.

I will close with this. “Rejoicing,” which these parable emphasize, typically means in the Bible, to celebrate with food. To party, in other words. What is really interesting is that these parables are the prelude for the big one about the prodigal son.
It has a happy ending for all, except the older brother, who refuses to rejoice, to party with his family. His refusal to have any empathy for either his brother’s previous lostness, or newfound happiness, or for his father’s happiness, is the source of his misery and loneliness. To survive as a whole person, he needs to imagine how the others might feel. So do we. In Jesus’ name. Amen.