UCN Annual Strawberry Festival

June 27th, 12 pm-4:30 pm

Come to the annual Strawberry Festival at the United Church of Northfield and enjoy local fresh picked strawberries on homemade shortcake or with an ice cream sundae featuring Ben and Jerry's vanilla ice cream, all topped with fresh homemade whipping cream. Saturday, June 27, 12 noon to 4:30 p.m. Take out orders and Gluten Free biscuits are available on request. Bring your family, friends and neighbors for a delicious summer treat and enjoy the local Fiddlers Group!!

Contact: Laura Ranker 802-610-4032.

Weekly Meditation

How do we know we are the good guys? This is a question most of us should “Probably” ask after having a disagreement with a spouse or close friend, when we present ourselves as people of moral maturity, how do we know that morality is grounded and authoritative, especially in a time where society's morals seem to be rapidly changing?

Who gets to choose what is morally correct? Is it our parents, and the lessons we learned from them? Or perhaps our pastors? Is it our government, or even the Bible?

In Christianity, it is almost uniformly agreed that any morality created by us flawed humans will have flaws. Morality needs to start with a higher power that is greater than human division. Christians would say that our morality stems from God, still, what does that look like?

In Matthew 10:40-41, Jesus tells his disciples, "Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet's reward, and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous.”

This passage is an invitation to his followers to open themselves to a moral message that comes from God. He implies not everyone has access to this morality because it trickles down from God, through people. People are imperfect, and so this sets a precedent. God’s moral message may come to us pure, but as people engage with it and are transformed by it, often, we mess up the message.

Right now Christianity is in the middle of a debate about our moral center. In the 1920’s a group of Presbyterian ministers rejected modern Biblical interpretations and advocated that Christians should adhere to traditional fundamentals that are unchanging and divine. The idea that the Bible is inerrant stems from this debate, but we should know that inerrancy is a Christian idea that has only been around for a little over a hundred years now. It is rooted in a belief that the Bible can be a perfect moral authority and so should be perfectly adhered to. 

Most modernist Christians would disagree with that, and argue that inerrancy is a rejection of Spiritual growth. It trains us to close ourselves off to the ongoing teachings of the faithful, such as our siblings in the LGBTQIA+ community and women, who have always deserved to stand behind the pulpit as teachers to all people. Biblical inerrancy is the belief that a few chosen passages of the Bible are the whole Bible and that falls into a trap Jesus warns us to avoid.

Only God is the true moral authority, and God’s command is Loving our neighbors as we would love God. I will always have a problem putting true moral authority in something like a book. A book cannot contain God, but trusting in Love is different. I know I can spend my whole life learning to love better. Love cannot be contained or restrained or fully understood, and neither can God. 

Love is the moral authority.

Rev. Devon Thomas

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