Good morning,

    Praise the Lord for this Friday. The  Lord blessed us with a beautiful day yesterday.  Alice and I walked over 4 miles last night.  It was a beautiful night.  The moon was brilliant and majestic.  Praise the Lord for  the way He shines His light on dark spots and dispels darkness.  

    Those of you live in the region join us for our weekly Friday Evening Television out reach this Evening on Time Warner Cable channel 4 at 7 PM.  As we journey through the Advent season we praise the Lord for He has a great sense of humor.      

    Throughout the ages, philosophers have debated over what is it that tickles our funny bone and causes that joyous explosion of air out of our lungs and across our vocal chords, which we call laughter.  G. K. Chesterton defined humor as the "sudden perception of incongruity." When two things we usually keep in separate compartments of our brains suddenly cross paths inside our head, the result is humor.  God indeed must have a sense of humor.

    In the Christmas story that which sounded like a terrible accident turned out to be the greatest story ever told.  Judging by this story, I believe God has the greatest sense of humor in the entire universe, in choosing common people to accomplish extraordinary purposes. 

    The Lord surprised a young man named Joseph.  Joseph, like Moses, was at first unaware of God's purposes and challenged by being a participant in God's divine plans.  Joseph was quiet and practical.  He liked working with wood, a material you can measure and cut and work with your hands.  He was an honest, simple tradesman.  He may have loved Mary for the same qualities: she was an honest, simple down-home girl, the kind you settle down with and raise a family. Perhaps Mary and Joseph already shared love, and trust, and dreams.  The date had been set,  and "the invitations were in the mail."  Then one day Mary said, "Joseph, I need to tell you, I'm going to have a baby."  Suddenly, Joseph's simple, perfect life dissolved into a world of pain.  Mary continued, "Oh Joseph, there's nothing to worry about.  You see, there was this angel."  We can imagine Joseph's response, "Yeah, sure, an angel . . . "

    In his poem "For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio", poet W. H. Auden pictured Joseph sitting alone in the dark, listening to the dripping of the faucet, as a voice said,

"Joseph, you have heard                                                                                         What Mary says occurred;  Yes, it may be Is it likely? No..Mary may be  pure   But, Joseph, are you sure?   How is one to tell?                                                       Suppose, for instance . . . Well . . .Maybe, maybe not.    But, Joseph, you know what  Your world, of course, will say About you anyway.                 Joseph looks up to God and pleads,  All I ask is one                                     Important and elegant proof  That what my Love had done                           Was really at your will  And that your will is Love.                                            Gabriel replies,  No, you must believe;  Be silent and sit still.                      Forgetting nothing, believing all"

    Then Gabriel laid out God's requirement of Joseph, "You must behave as if this were not strange at all . . . To do what's difficult all one's days."  But that, at first, proved too much to ask of this young man.  According to the Bible, when Mary started to show, he had no choice but to "put her away" — to distance himself from her as a righteous man.  One night before he did so, an angel appeared to Joseph and said, "Joseph, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife.  The child within her is from God.  This is Immanuel, the long-awaited fulfillment of prophecy, God with us."

    Although the text doesn't say so, Joseph's first reaction to this announcement may have been, "Wait a minute!  I didn't sign up for this.  All I want is to be a carpenter, to have a wife and a house and a yard and a family."  Many years prior, that had been the kind of surprise God had in store for a white-haired lady named Sarah.  She probably had to squint to focus on the baby in her arms, who wasn't her grandson, but the son born to her in her twilight years.  Her husband, Abraham, was one hundred years old — .  Genesis tells us that when Abraham heard he was going to be a father at his advanced age, he fell on the ground laughing.   At another point Sarah was eavesdropping from behind the flap of the tent.  When she heard God's news that she would bear a son, she laughed, perhaps until tears streamed down her cheeks.  God, however, had the last laugh. He told Abraham and Sarah their child would be a boy and he would be named Isaac — in Hebrew yitzak — which means laughter.

    Our God revealed in the Person of Jesus Christ our Lord and King, takes great delight in derailing our best-laid plans, and in giving us the last thing we ever expected.  The next time a monkey wrench drops out of heaven into your well-oiled machinery, don't curse God.  Look up and say thank you.  Take a moment to see that unwelcome surprise as an opportunity to trust, a gift to receive, a command to obey.  Ultimately, life gives us little we expect, but God gives us everything we need, beyond our dreams, just as He did for Joseph.

  In Christ,

   Brown

http://youtu.be/DSlIx7xqANg

Saturday, December 10, 2011

        Christmas banquet

        Home Made cooking, "best in the County".  donation $7.00

        Serving at 12 noon

        At Wesley United Methodist Church.

             1000 Day Hollow Road, Endicott, NY 13760

        Come... Share... Rejoice

        For Information: 607-748-6329

 

    

        Saturday, December 10, 2011

        Praise and Worship Service

        First United Methodist Church, Endicott

        Sponsored by  Union Center UMC

        6 PM Gathering - Coffee - Fellowship

        6:30 PM  Worship

        Music:  Jane Hettinger                      

        Speaker: Dave Hettinger

Brown's Daily Word 12-8-11

 

Good morning,

    Praise the Lord for this new day.  The Lord blessed us with a beautiful day of Wednesday gathering yesterday.  "Young at Heart", our seniors of the Church gathered for their annual Christmas celebration yesterday noon.  The Wednesday Bible Study group gathered for our weekly fellowship and study.  It being the Pearl Harbor day yesterday, we watched a powerful and anointed Video presentation on Pearl Harbor.  Our youth are gathering tomorrow for their Christmas celebration.  Praise the Lord for many service men and women who will be coming home for  Christmas.  It is a glorious scene when we see members of our armed forces come home for Christmas

     "I'll be back soon," a World War II soldier told his wife before leaving her and their infant son.  Five years of war and fighting went by.  The young mother would show her boy a portrait of the soldier and say, "See, that's your daddy.  One day he's going to come home."  In reality, she didn't know what to expect.  One morning the boy said, Mommy, wouldn't it be great if Daddy would just step out of the picture frame?"

    In a sense that's what God did 2000 years ago.  As part of His eternal plan, He stepped out of heaven and became a man so you and I could look at Jesus and say, "That's what God looks like."  The apostle John described the stepping out, "The Word became flesh and lived among us.  We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth" (John 1:14, NIV).  Jesus made His dwelling among us.  He camped out in our midst.  He moved into our neighborhood.  When Jesus visited this planet there was a stench from the sin that pervaded the place. The garbage of humanity was strewn everywhere.  He stepped out of the heavenly portrait to take His place in a dirty, faded, and mangled earthly photograph.

    He came seeking to save the lost and to give His life as a ransom for many.  Think about old stingy Zacchaeus, whom his community despised and hated as a tax collector and as a representative of the Roman oppression in their town.  Jesus, immediately upon entering that community, stepped out of popular etiquette and looked up and saw Zacchaeus hiding in the tree and said, "Zacchaeus, I'm coming to your house for dinner today."

    Reflect also upon the woman at the well in Samaria.  She went to the well at the hottest point of the day, because she couldn't bear the scorn of the other women in town who looked down upon her in shame because of her immoral lifestyle. Jesus stepped out of the cultural traditions and asked her for a drink of water and then turned and offered her the living water.

    I think about  Jesus and the children.  The disciples thought of the children as pests, and they were shooed away.  Jesus stepped out of accepted "religious leader" behavior and said, "No, no, let the little children come to me."  He did not just reach down and pat them on the head.  He reached out and scooped them up and hugged them.

    Throughout all of Jesus' time on this earth, and even today, He steps out to meet people at their point of need. He is just that way.  He continues to demonstrate, time and again, that He is a man of grace.  When Jesus stepped out of Heaven-zone, He became a  man.  The Gospel of John says that Jesus was also full of truth.  The word "truth" literally means "that which is open to view, that which is unconcealed, that which is transparent."  I especially appreciate Moffat's translation of this verse.  He translates this word as "reality," saying that Jesus was full of grace and reality.  Jesus was real.  In fact, He was the most real person who had ever lived before that time, who was living then, and who has ever lived since.  When Jesus stepped out He was real.

    Christmas is not some surrealistic image of what life might be like; it is the reality of the one called the Christ who stepped out to show us what life really is and should be.

  In Christ,

     Brown

http://youtu.be/687uJwlPaPw

 

 Saturday, December 10, 2011

        Christmas banquet

        Home Made cooking, "best in the County".  donation $7.00

        Serving at 12 noon

        At Wesley United Methodist Church.

             1000 Day Hollow Road, Endicott, NY 13760

        Come... Share... Rejoice

        For Information: 607-748-6329

 

    

        Saturday, December 10, 2011

        Praise and Worship Service

        First United Methodist Church, Endicott

        Sponsored by  Union Center UMC

        6 PM Gathering - Coffee - Fellowship

        6:30 PM  Worship

        Music:  Jane Hettinger                      

        Speaker: Dave Hettinger

Brown's Daily Word 12-7-11

Good morning,

    Praise the Lord for this Holy Advent season.   We will meet for our mid-week gathering for fellowship, Bible Study and choir practice this evening starting at 6 PM. We spent the yesterday in New York City.  It was a glorious day.  Indeed, it's Christmas time in the city.  People from all around the world come to New York City during Christmas.  I met a man from Germany in front of Rockefeller Center.  You can see people from everywhere all dressed up, looking jubilant.  The Salvation Army bands were playing everywhere, dancing and making a joyful noise.  

    Harry Emerson Fosdick was born in Buffalo, New York.  During his lifetime he became pastor of the world famous Riverside Church. in New York city. Years ago, someone came up to Dr. Fosdick to inform him that he didn't know how anyone could live in a place like New York, with all those temptations around!  All those things that can pull a person down!  All those enticements that could lure a young person into depravity and sin!  Fosdick agreed.  New York City was full of temptations.  It was filled with things that tugged at a person's heart, but Dr. Fosdick also said that he was glad to live there, since, just as there were many temptations of evil, so there were multitudes of temptations to glory.  There was the Metropolitan Opera, where a person could be held in the sway of great music.  There were the art galleries where you could lose yourself in wonder.  There were colleges and universities where temptations to learning soared.  There were libraries where the wisdom of the world beckoned.

    This road at the edge of eternity, this highway parallel to heaven, is a scary road to travel.  It would be easier to try live a "safer" existence, to go back inland where you are not tempted to jump over the cliff.  Yet then you would miss the other temptations as will -- the temptation to know life in the fullness that God intended for it; the temptation to soar on wings of love and of mercy, of grace, of beauty, and of song.  The Scriptures speak of heaven in this way because the best of what we experience now is only the beginning of what life will be like when Jesus returns.

    Charles Williams, one of the Inklings with C. S. Lewis at Oxford, wrote a small volume called Outline of Romantic Theology.  He said that for too long Christians have tried to summarize their faith in dogmas of theory and creeds of intellect and in rational statements of mental construct.  Unfortunately, he said, that is not what Christianity is all about.  The Christian religion is a romance. It is a love affair as deep and as true and as powerful as God Himself is.

    Why did God make this world?  It was because He wanted to express His love. Why did God allow us to sin?  It was to give us the freedom to choose to love Him or not.  Why did Jesus come?  He came to woo us back to love, and to court us into the best of life.  What is heaven?  Heaven is love made complete.  This is the "outline of romantic theology" in a nutshell.

    When Paul talked about Jesus coming again, He was really calling us to live life here to the full, to run the road at the edge of eternity, keeping the panorama of heaven before us, and allowing it to beckon us on toward the place where the road turns again.

    It is not in craziness or some kind of delusion that we celebrate advent.  Advent affirms that the best of life here is what Jesus brought with Him that day when He stepped over the cliff at Bethlehem, and better that things are coming still, as we travel the road next to eternity.  We stand and walk on the brink of eternity, where the road runs parallel with heaven.  It is where Jesus steps into our lives and suddenly we wake to the glories of His love.

  In Christ of Christmas,

      Brown

http://youtu.be/1JPeUQMcBkY

  Saturday, December 10, 2011

        Christmas banquet

        Home Made cooking, "best in the Country".  donation $7.00

        Serving at 12 noon

        At Wesley United Methodist Church.

             1000 Day Hollow Road, Endicott, NY 13760

        Come... Share... Rejoice

        For Information: 607-748-6329

    

        Saturday , December 10 12, 2011

        Praise and Worship Service

        First United Methodist Church , Endicott

        Sponsored by  Union Center UMC

        6 PM Gathering - Coffee - Fellowship

        6:30 PM  Worship

        Music:  Jane Hettinger                      

        Speaker: Dave Hettinger

Brown's Daily Word 12-5-11

 

Good morning,

    Praise the Lord for this Advent season.  The Lord blessed us with a full weekend of gathering, fellowship, worship, and witness.  The concert by the St Petersburg Men's Ensemble on Saturday Evening at First UMC Endicott  was a huge blessing.  It is a treat for to have the Men from St Petersburg, Russia come every year during the Advent season.  Though they sang in Russian, we declare that "Love in any language, is fluently spoken here".   The Russian Men also sang during our 8:30 worship at the Union Center Church. 

    Sunita and Andy and some of their friends attended the Handel's Messiah presentation at the National Cathedral in Washington this weekend.  We are planning to attend  the Handel's Messiah on Friday, December 16, at the Forum in Binghamton.  We are taking a bus trip to New York city tomorrow to spend the day in the New York City, visiting various sites including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and Ground Zero, and then attend the Christmas Extravaganza at Radio City Music Hall.

    The Old Testament reading for yesterday was taken from Isaiah 40:1-11.  In this Old Testament passage, we see the compassionate, loving nature of God.  Comfort is spoken to those who suffered through the Babylonian exile.  These Israelites saw the destruction of their homeland, Judah, including their capital, Jerusalem, and their sacred temple on Mt. Zion. They were exiled from their land to live among the enemy for nearly 50 years.  The prophets described the exile as punishment for the rebellious, apostate house of Judah. They saw Babylon as the rod of God's anger against His people.

    The tables were to turn in Isaiah 40.  Here we see comfort extended because the house of Judah had paid the price for its sin (vv. 1-2).  The end of the exile was  proclaimed.  The landscape was about to be reversed (vv. 3-5).  The life the Israelites had come to know in Babylon was about to be altered. Hope was just around the corner.  Restoration waited in the wings as the Lord was coming to redeem His people and their land; He was coming in power and might.  The prophet called the people to imagine the impossible that was on the way. 

    The exile was a seemingly hopeless situation, but the return to Judah after the exile made the impossible possible.  This powerful passage resonates with us today in wonderful and powerful way.   There are many who live in exile, whether spiritually, emotionally, economically, or socially. 

    The birth of our Lord heralds a message of hope.  God is into redeeming His people.  Author Francine Rivers best expresses this character of God in her book Redeeming Love.  She portrays a Hosea figure who loves a prostitute similar to Gomer.  His constant love for her, despite her rebellion and resistance eventually changes her.  She becomes a redeemed person.  Rivers accurately communicates God's redeeming love... His life-changing love, through her story.

    Even more deeply than the Rivers' novel, God longs to take the chaos and failure of our lives and completely rework the landscape.  He is God, who makes the rough places smooth and the crooked places straight (v. 4).   We all can identify rough places in our lives and acknowledge that we are all need redeeming love. We  often can find ourselves in the middle of a troublesome marriage or dealing with family problems.  We may have a difficult job situation or an impossible boss, or we may be frustrated with parents, children,or roommates.  We may struggle with baggage from the past, a lack of commitment, etc.

    I  have seen rocky marriages become smooth, chains fall from those in bondage, and burdens lifted from those who were heavy-laden.  I also have seen many remain in their exile—functional in their dysfunction.  It is heartbreaking.  Practically speaking, much prayer, forgiveness, hard work and lots of personal change will heal marriages and most relationships a much more effectively than expecting the other person to change first.  We have to be willing to let the Lord take the plow to our lives, uproot the soil, and rework us.

    "'Comfort, comfort, My people,' says your God."  His message of comfort and hope is for us in the midst of our situations.  We have a God who longs to deliver us from exile and redeem us back to Himself.  God offers us comfort and healing today—healing in the present and healing from the past.  Will we receive it this Christmas season?  "Prepare the way of the Lord" (v. 3).  He longs to invade our lives, and rework the landscape.  Let us  allow Him to do that today.

 

 In Christ,

     Brown

http://youtu.be/uiBwXw7ueLM

 

        Saturday, December 10, 2011

        Christmas banquet

        Home Made cooking, "best in the Country".  donation $7.00

        Serving at 12 noon

        At Wesley United Methodist Church.

             1000 Day Hollow Road, Endicott, NY 13760

        Come... Share... Rejoice

        For Information: 607-748-6329

 

    

        Saturday , December 10 12, 2011

        Praise and Worship Service

        First United Methodist Church , Endicott

        Sponsored by  Union Center UMC

        6 PM Gathering - Coffee - Fellowship

        6:30 PM  Worship

        Music:  Jane Hettinger                      

        Speaker: Dave Hettinger