From our Moderator, Rev. Elder Cecilia Eggleston

Today, receive the February letter from our Moderator, Rev. Elder Cecilia Eggleston:

"Finally, siblings, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things….. and the God of peace will be with you." (Philippians 4: 8-9)

Dear people of God,

You don’t need me to tell you how challenging life is around the world just now or how badly justice is needed. You know already that “justice is not a distraction from the Gospel. It is a demonstration of the Gospel” (Dr. Jemar Tisby - Historian and author). You are living it out every day.

In this letter, I want to focus differently. 

It is possible for many things to be true at the same time. 

We rage at the news one moment and then are astounded by the sunset the next. We feel lost and alone, then a stranger in a shop makes us laugh by the way they interact with their fractious child. We feel exhausted and weighed down, then a message comes through from someone we love with an invitation to have coffee…..and cake!

What is giving you joy at this time? 

What has caused you to catch your breath with awe and delight in the past week or so?  

What is bringing you a moment of peace or calm?

These are important questions. 

Someone shared recently about how there are Christians who interpret feeling fear as a lack of faith. They claim if we are fearful, we are not trusting God. I personally think that it would take a huge level of faith for many of us not to feel afraid now, or at other times in our lives. Even Jesus showed fear in the Garden of Gethsemane and asked God to spare him from the trials ahead.

Perhaps, amid all that can paralyse us with fear, we can give ourselves permission to see God in beauty, kindness, laughter and the strength of being in community. We can decide to do one or two things every day that intentionally shift our energy. It may be small and simple, yet done consistently it can make a difference. During the pandemic, one of my brothers, who lives alone, told me he started every day by watching an episode of a particular TV show that always made him laugh. Whatever the rest of the day held, he started the day laughing out loud and feeling buoyed up. However the day ended, he had a consistent plan to start the next day well.

Joy, creativity, beauty, music, dance, laughter are all spiritual gifts for us. It is important to lament and listen to our anger. It is also important to feed ourselves with what will nurture us. 

Our bodies, minds and souls need respite and relief. It might be a time to try something new, if what you have done before is not working at this time. 

This is why being in a spiritual community is so powerful. We feed each other, support each other, hold and encourage each other. I regularly worship online with MCC congregations around the world. It is always a blessing to see folk gathering together and to hear all that you are doing to serve the community where you are. What you are doing is a blessing to others!

In her book, “Return to the Root” Joyce Rupp describes being at an interfaith gathering after a deadly terrorist attack in New Zealand. The atmosphere was subdued as the audience listened to many different speakers. Finally, a Rabbi stood up. He spoke very briefly and then started to sing the Bill Withers song “Lean on Me”. After the first line, everyone joined in, and by the end of the song, the atmosphere had shifted to a surge of compassion and hope. Rupp writes “No one said it out loud, but I’m confident that we each felt we could be the arms of the Holy, welcoming who needed holding when they were hurting”.

We all need moments like this, on our own or collectively, where our hearts and our spirits are lifted and filled. Our God is a just and faithful God. We are followers of Jesus for the long haul, not just in easy times. The Holy Spirit is dancing in and through us, even when we can’t feel it. Someone else sees God when they see you. Take time to love and nurture yourself, even as you love your neighbour. 

God bless,

Rev. Elder Cecilia Eggleston

Moderator, Metropolitan Community Churches

How The Light Comes

I cannot say which I love best about the light:
that it gathers itself even in what goes hidden,
no stranger to the seed, the stone, the labyrinth of night,
or that it is wildly generous in where it lands, glad the same to
touch the face of the one in laughter, the one in tears, the one in trouble,
in fear, in pain.But it may yet be that this is what woos me most about the light: 
that it knows what to do with distance, how it arcs across the space between a heart
and a heart, illuminatingly that ache through which the farthest of stars might be seen.

⁃ Jan Richardson 

Last week as activists came together in Missouri, I was with activists in DC gathering together to coalesce around topics that breathe life into us, as others try to restrict that very breath. 

This year, we celebrated the 10th Anniversary of the Many Paths Gathering Space an interfaith center for contemplation, spiritual healing, and community at Creating Change, the nation's largest queer-centered conference. This space was created because of the ways religion has been a catalyst for reform, in ways that harm and in ways that heal. We know that in working toward freedom in the public space, we also have to work for freedom in the soul. And so, as a group, we held prayer vigils, we sung, we talked about the Bible, the Torah, and offered a space for daily Muslim prayer. We created walls to uplift queer saints who have shown us the way, and offered space for people to write down their prayers. On our altar, we had a station of dissolving paper where people could come and write something down to let go of, reminding all of us that we don't have to hold it all alone. Many people came right to this station and left, needing only to leave something behind, in which they could not carry alone anymore. 

As we consider what it means to be a people of daybreak, daylight, and, these days, as we often sit in the long shadows of evening, I’m reminded of the need for us to tend to the space between our hearts — to ache, to laugh, to subvert, and to release. 

Today, in the light of evening, what woos you about the light? What tends to the sighs of your heart? What binds you to the inner and outer work of a faith rooted in love but too often used for harm? 

With you in the shadows, 
Pastor Lauren 

For Such A Time As This

This past Tuesday, I traveled to Jefferson City to testify against the removal of the sunset on bills that could permanently ban gender-affirming medical care for trans youth in Missouri and permanently bar trans youth from participating in sports alongside their peers.

What happens in Missouri matters. Many states look to Missouri to see what is possible legislatively, so what gets passed here — and what does not — carries weight far beyond our borders.

As I’ve been reflecting on this week, I keep returning to our theme: By a Different Light. On Sunday, we will talk about day — about how daylight exposes what has been hidden, how it calls things out into the open. And that truth feels especially present right now.

There is a growing number of trans adults, parents of trans kids, and even medical professionals who are afraid to testify publicly against these bills. They are afraid of retaliation, professional consequences, harassment, and real harm. To speak in the light right now comes with real risk.

I am deeply grateful, and humbled, to serve in a role where I can speak not only as a faith leader, but as a trans faith leader, calling our representatives toward a deeper practice of justice, mercy, and compassion. To invite them into holy curiosity about the lives that are most impacted by these decisions. To ask them to truly listen to those who are being harmed.

On Wednesday morning, I also joined dozens of organizations from across the state at a rally in the Capitol rotunda. We linked arms and stood shoulder to shoulder, singing and chanting, reminding one another that we show up for one another. We show up for Black lives. For immigrant lives. For trans lives. For queer lives. For workers’ lives. Because together, our voices carry a deeply moving power.

That rally was deeply needed after the heartbreaking and exhausting hearing on Tuesday. Missourians have been fighting these anti-trans bills for years now, and at times it feels as though those in power have not heard a word, as though harm is dismissed in the pursuit of an agenda at any cost.

And yet, I remain honored to be one voice among many who continue to speak love into the hearing rooms. Love for trans youth who desperately need to know they are not alone. Love for parents doing everything they can to protect their children. Love for trans adults who are not only advocating for today’s youth, but also for the younger versions of themselves, the children who always knew who they were.

For such a time as this, my friends, it is urgent that we keep showing up. Each in the ways we can. Whether that looks like someone who knits blankets for trans folks who testify, wrapping them in warmth and protection. Whether it means traveling to Jefferson City, attending a rally, having hard conversations with loved ones, or choosing to hope even when hope feels fragile and distant and perhaps beyond our reach.

This work is not easy. But it is sacred. And it matters deeply. When we share our light and our love, when we refuse to turn away from one another, we participate in bending the moral arc of the universe toward justice, peace, freedom, and love for all. May we keep showing up. May we keep loving boldly. And may we continue to believe that what we do, as we link arm in arm, truly matters.

In Solidarity,
Pastor Eli

φῶς

The word φῶς (phōs) appears more than 70 times in the Greek New Testament. When translated literally, it comes into English as light. As with most words, φῶς has more to it than a single-word definition. It carries more meaning than “this is that.” In scripture, the light can be the illumination that comes from the sun or from a candle. It can also serve as a metaphor for awareness—a spark of revelation.

In the season of Epiphany we celebrate the arrival of the Magi who saw a star on the night of Jesus’ birth and followed its light to him. In that light, Jesus is revealed to all of us outside of his immediate community. God is made flesh for all of us who will receive this revelation, no matter who or where we are. 

In this season of Epiphany, we are invited to be φῶς. Illuminating love and grace and hope. Bringing awareness to injustice and oppression. Revealing God’s enduring presence. The light is in us and all around us. The light is a gift we are given to carry into the world.

Last week, we began our series on light with DeMarco Davidson, and for the next 5 weeks we will continue to embrace light as we wrestle with how to be light for our times in the most expansive ways we can find it in scripture and in life.

In Light,
Rev. Tijuana Gray

Demand Freedom from ICE

Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door! - Emma Lazarus

These words, penned to raise money for the pedestal that houses the Statue of Liberty, hark a kind of welcome to the immigrant, to the fearful, to the migrant that couldn’t feel more distant from reality. Perhaps it’s right to remember that this country has always held the balance between creative, expansive imagination and brutality. We live on stolen land. We stole forced labor and separated people from their families, from native culture, land, and language. 

Yet, throughout time, we have seen the impact of resilience as people have turned cities into thriving communities where difference is celebrated, people share resources, and wealth is built through sharing, not taking. In too many places, these are ideals to be lived into, not yet realities, but I refuse to lose hope that our country can heal toward the ideals that we are shaping every day through resilience and having bigger dreams than our founders.

Most importantly, I refuse to lose focus on our mandate as a people of faith to “proclaim good news to the poor, proclaim freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free… “ (Luke 4:18-19). 

In light of the cold-blooded murder of same-gender-loving mom and poet, Renee Nicole Good, 37, by ICE I couldn’t agree more with what Rev. Cameron Trimble wrote of this moment: 

“What we are witnessing now is what happens when fear is institutionalized.

When enforcement becomes militarized, judgment collapses into reflex. When people are reduced to targets, the possibility of restraint disappears. When a system is designed to move fast, to overwhelm, to dominate, death becomes not a failure but a risk casually accepted.

This is not law and order. It is yet one more moral rupture.

It places an unbearable burden not only on migrants and communities, but on those tasked with carrying out these policies. Systems that reward aggression and punish restraint deform everyone inside them. Violence spreads outward and inward at the same time.

For people of faith, this moment asks of us more than outrage. It demands clarity.

• Clarity that a person’s life cannot be collateral damage in the pursuit of policy.

• Clarity that public safety cannot be built on terror.

• Clarity that borders do not erase humanity.

We must, all of us, see this clearly: a nation that responds to migration with lethal force has lost its way.

And yet, even after all the trauma we are absorbing, I must encourage us. Faith refuses despair.

Faith insists that heartbreak is not the end of moral responsibility—it is often the beginning. It calls us to grieve fully, to name what has gone wrong, and to labor for a different way. Not a naïve way. A human one.” 

So, if you are feeling full of rage, that’s good. Jesus flipped tables at the ways people were exploited. Let your rage fill your belly so you speak out in the face of injustice. 

If you are feeling full of grief, that’s good. Job’s friends tore their garments in solidarity with their friend who lost everything. Let your grief draw you near to those who suffer and to your own suffering. 

If you are full of despair, that’s okay. You are like the disciples who stayed paralyzed in the Upper Room after Jesus’ death. Let your despair find home in a journal or prayer, but let it not be the last word.

Remember, God stands with the just, God speaks to us in the whirlwind, God returns to us in our sorrow to show us the way toward peace and creates a pathway to liberation. 

Dear ones, I don’t know what the days to come will hold, but I do know we will get through them with faith, with peace that demands courage, and with love that is stronger than fear. If you want to be around others tonight, meet us on Manchester and Sarah at 6pm.

In Deep Rage, Deep Grief, and Deep Faith, 
Pastor Lauren 

Wishing You Ease and Tenderness As You Step Into A New Year

As the year continues to draw to a close, know we will be surrounded by an overwhelming amount of reminders. There are end-of-year videos, listening statistics, photo recaps, and carefully edited summaries of who we were and what we did. Every platform invites us to remember our year in neat highlights, to capture it in ways that feel acceptable to show the world.

But what is truly important to remember as this year ends?

We have been taught, in so many subtle and not subtle ways, to only show the pretty and polished parts of our lives. There is a culture of sharing the moments that feel impressive, joyful, and put-together. And yet, every life holds far more than what could ever fit into a recap. There are so many sides to each life and each story that we see. Rarely do we see anything that happened moments before or moments after the picture was taken. So much of what we will see at the end of this year is shaped by what we think is safe or worthy of being seen.

Andrea Gibson names this beautifully in their poem Boomerang Valentine:

“Picture the 738 selfies I deleted
before I took one I was willing to show to the world.
Picture me wishing I could get all of them back—
my so-called flaws stacked like baseball cards
I know will be worth something someday,
like compassion, like tenderness,
like my capacity to think myself a catch just because
I have never seen a chandelier I didn’t want to swing from.”

I hope each of us can look back at this year and hold with love the moments we are proud of, the moments we are not, the moments that made us smile, and the moments that made us weep. 

I wish end of the year recaps showed us how many times you told your friends that you loved them, how many times your friends told you that they loved you, how many strangers we made smile, how many moments brought us to tears or moved us in deep ways, or how many days we made better by the small acts of kindness we did for another person.

Much of what matters most, happened off camera. In the quiet moments we sometimes forget even happened. In the moments of kindness and love, that you might never know changed the course of another persons life. As this year ends, let us end it with gentleness and tenderness for ourselves. For all that we showed the world, and for all that we felt we had to keep hidden. 

If you remember anything this year, I hope you:
Remember your goodness.
Remember how loved you are.
Remember how important you are.
Remember that you are the best thing that has ever happened to you.
With compassion for all that you showed the world, and all that you did not,

Pastor Eli  

Merry Christmas Eve

“And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth and laid him in a manger, because there was no place in the guest room.” - Luke 2:7

Merry Christmas, friends!

Tonight, as we gather around candles, at church or in our hearts, we cradle the light of Christ that came in on a night when everyone was full of fear. When Mary and Joseph finally found refuge from a long and arduous journey, they did not get to go right to sleep — even a fitful sleep that often accompanies a first night in a new place. Instead, their worst fears came true: away from the comforts of home, Mary would deliver her baby. Childbirth was much more dangerous than it is now, and I can only begin to imagine the questions Mary had when the labor pains began. 

Despite the fears, she had no choice but to surrender to the ancient process of bringing life into the world, trusting her body and the people around her to know what to do, no matter what happened next. I can imagine the relief on her face when her baby was brought to her chest to lie as they both found a way to breathe, Jesus for the first time, and Mary for the first time in a long time. 

Perhaps the tradition to join our lights and hearts together in the stillness of night reflects this moment more than Jesus’s actual birth, which must have been chaotic, full of fear, and messy. When we sing Silent Night, perhaps we are doing so to give into that sense of relief that follows fear. 

In Luke’s account of Jesus’s birth, this detail of Mary wrapping Jesus in bands of cloth strikes me as something of a miracle. In a fearful time, in a messy birth, with scraps, God incarnate - fully dependent on the hospitality and love of other humans - is laid to find a peaceful night’s rest in the midst of a terror-filled world. In the years to come, Jesus would stand toe-to-toe with the power of the world, combating it with the power of love. But for now, a miracle baby sleeps in a borrowed bed, in a borrowed room, with an exhausted family. 

Friends, as we, together, birth the way of Love into the world, may we feel the peace of our labors even just for a moment, as we cradle the light of Christ born anew on our hearts and in our world. 

With Tidings of Comfort and Joy, 
Pastor Lauren 

Art: "Mary Breastfeeding Baby Jesus" by Kelly Latimore