FCC Winchester

To start this time of sharing and reflecting on the Good News of our Sacred Scripture, I would like to introduce the voice of someone else who has shared and reflected on some of the same text that we have heard today. She was an English-born, naturalized-American, whose work “embraced a wide variety of genres and themes, including nature lyrics, love poems, protest poetry, and poetry inspired by her faith in God” in the twentieth century (Poetry Foundation 2026). Her writing bears the spirit of dissension and justice, alongside the remarkable ability to seek unity and interconnection. She wrote from the poster-clad streets and meeting halls of the anti-war movement. She wrote, too, from the pages of the unconventional, personal Black Mountain writer movement, which elevated the everyday and eschewed the structures and strictures of past literary and artistic expectations. Her name was Denise Levertov. 

For about 185 years this church has stood on this plot of land doing its churchy thing, looking beautiful and raising heads and lifting eyes toward the heavens, opening space for prayer and for worship, for community and for serving. Sometimes it’s been a place of comfort and care. And sometimes it’s been a place of challenge and provocation, pushing the people who come through the doors to think more deeply, act more lovingly, live more faithfully. It’s the church doing its churchy thing. Reminding people that there’s a God above and beneath, within and between, it all and a God of love at that. Over all these years, we’ve come here to light candles in the dark of Christmas Eve to proclaim the Light Come into the world as a babe in a manger and then we’ve come here months later to extinguish the candles as we read of his suffering and his death in Holy Week out of Holy Love. What a thing we do together here, how odd and ancient and beautiful. We tell our children about this man from God who taught people that they are loved and taught them to love, even and most especially the unloveable. Sometimes here there are rituals of death and departures and sometimes baptismal rituals of births and arrivals, sometimes people coming together in loving union and sometimes we hold vigils to grieve how we can be torn apart.