Emmanuel United Church of Christ - UCC

04/02/2026

04/02/2026

02/06/2026

Congregational Meeting Rescheduled
Due to the weather from the last two weeks our congregational meeting has been rescheduled for February 15 at 3:00 pm in the fellowship hall. Please plan to join us for this important conversation about our future, budget, and work together.

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11/11/2025

“Thankful Anyway”

Let's be honest, these are not easy days to be thankful. The headlines read more like battle reports than good news. The air feels thick with meanness; too many people ready to shout, too few ready to listen. We live in a time when gratitude can seem like a luxury, or worse, a denial of reality.

Yet, the gospel dares to call us to give thanks anyway. “Give thanks in all circumstances,” says the apostle Paul (1 Thess 5:18), not because all circumstances are good (we all know better), but because God’s faithfulness does not depend on the circumstances (go ahead, read that again). Gratitude, in days like these, is not sentimental, it is an act of courage.

When we give thanks, we stand against the tide of fear that tells us there isn’t enough to go around; not enough hope, not enough truth, not enough compassion. We live in a culture that feeds on outrage and rewards suspicion. Gratitude interrupts and disrupts that story. It reminds us that the world, for all its pain and politics, is still held in the hands of a generous God.

Thankfulness, then, is subversive and a form of resistance. To say “thank you” in a thankless world is to declare that grace still breaks in, that abundance still defies scarcity, and that goodness is not exhausted by our divisions. Gratitude pulls us out of the cramped space of self-interest and invites us into community. It is how we remember that life is a gift, not a possession.

Scripture teaches this idea over and over again. The psalmist, exiled and homesick, still sings, “Give thanks to the Lord, for the Lord is good; the Lord's steadfast love endures forever.” The people of God have always learned to give thanks and not just when everything was right, but precisely when it wasn’t: when the temple was gone, when the land was lost, when hope seemed thin. They were neither naive nor pollyanna, instead they learned to speak gratitude as a defiant language of faith.

That is our calling too. To be thankful when it’s hard. To hold fast to hope when others trade in fear. To practice generosity in a season of grasping. To trust that God’s abundance is still the truest story being told. To be a part of that story in what we do and how we act toward others and ourselves.

So, give thanks for the neighbor who shows up when you least expect it, for the small kindness that interrupts your cynicism, for the breath you didn’t earn but were given. Give thanks that God has not left us to our politics or our bitterness, but still calls us to build a more merciful and a more graceful world.

Gratitude won’t make the hard days disappear, but it will make us different people in the midst of them: steadier, kinder, more alive to the grace that still pulses beneath the noise.

Let us pray:
O God of abundance, teach us to give thanks when it makes no sense, to trust your generosity when fear would rule us, and to live as people who know that every good gift, every dawn, every neighbor, every breath, is from you. Amen.

With gratitude and hope,
Vaughn

10/14/2025

A Gospel Response to Violence, Conflict, and Hate

Every week seems to bring new headlines steeped in violence: another shooting, another war, another word spoken to wound. It’s easy to feel powerless before it all, to retreat into despair or numbness. As people of faith, we are called not just to lament violence, but to resist it, in ourselves, in our communities, and in the systems that perpetuate it.

Two modern prophets of peace, Walter Wink and Glenn Stassen, help us see how the gospel offers not passive acceptance or vengeful retaliation, but a third way, what Wink called “Jesus’ third way of nonviolent resistance.”

Wink pointed out that when Jesus said, “Turn the other cheek” or “Go the second mile,” he wasn’t telling his followers to submit to abuse. He was teaching how to defy injustice without mirroring its cruelty. Turning the other cheek, in Wink’s reading, forces the aggressor to see the other’s humanity. It unbalances the system of domination by refusing to play its game. It’s not weakness; it’s moral jujitsu.

Glenn Stassen built on this vision with what he called "Just Peacemaking," a set of practical practices for creating peace in real life using diplomacy instead of demonizing, community building instead of isolation, restorative justice instead of revenge. Stassen reminded us that peace is not just the absence of conflict but the presence of justice.

In the United Church of Christ, we say that “God is still speaking.” Maybe God is saying: Don’t let the world teach you that violence is redemptive or inevitable. Because it’s not. Every time we listen before shouting, every time we help rather than harden, every time we tell the truth in love, every time we forgive rather than avenge, we chip away at the myth that violence wins.

Wink once wrote, “The Powers are not evil in themselves, but they have fallen and they must be redeemed.” That means governments, corporations, even churches, are not beyond hope. They are arenas for redemption, not escape. Let that sink in.

So when violence erupts, in the world or in our own hearts, our question is not “How can I win?” but “How can I bear witness to another way?” The gospel’s answer is never indifference, and never vengeance. It is courageous, creative, costly love. And love, if we dare to practice it, still has power.