Open Table United Church of Christ

09/04/2026

Theologian M. Shawn Copeland laments the many people and places that suffer ongoing crucifixion:

To know and to follow Christ crucified is to know and love those children, women, and men who are poor, excluded, and despised, made different and unwelcome, lynched and crucified in our world….

If we would follow Christ crucified, we would hear the echoes of ululation and bitter weeping in Gaza and in Rafah, in Baghdad and in Beirut, in Cairo and in Kigali….

If we would follow Christ crucified, we would hold in memory the tears that fell on the rude and bloodied floors of the holding forts of Cape Coast, Elmina, and Christiansborg….

If we would follow Christ crucified, we would press to our hearts the tears that flowed from the eyes of Cherokee, Seminole, and Choctaw children and women and men who limped through the cold and hunger from Oklahoma to Arkansas and Alabama and Mississippi….

If we would follow Christ crucified, we would recover the tears that fell on the floors of the camps at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibór….

If we would follow Christ crucified, we would retrieve the tears that flowed from the eyes of children and women and men who crowded into flimsy boats and old trucks and shipping containers to suffocate and die in front of fences strung across the desert, at abandoned check points on the outer edge of rural towns, and at heavily guarded borders near rivers and waterways….

If we would follow Christ crucified with attention, reverence, and devotion, we would recognize that the tears and blood and moans of the innocent have been absorbed into the air we breathe, have seeped into our streams and … oceans, into the earth in which we plant and from which we harvest and eat.

If we follow with attention, reverence, and devotion the moans and tears of the brutalized and burned, r***d and mutilated, enslaved and captive across the centuries, we are led to the ground beneath the cross of the crucified Jewish Jesus of Nazareth. [1]

The crucified Jesus enfleshes for all and for us the very meaning of being human, of being a person who embraces and lives out God’s gracious gift of love and freedom.

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34–36)…. We who would be his disciples discover our humanity, our personhood in imitation of him—in taking up our cross in order to transform evil into good, for the cross belongs not only to Christ but to all humanity. “He chose it because of us, and we choose it because of him.” [2] We who would be his disciples incarnate the meaning in our own lives by following the moans and tears … into a crucified world, taking up an active, compassionate, solidaristic mission.

[1] M. Shawn Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience (Orbis Books, 2018), 133­, 134–135.
[2] Bernard Lonergan, “The Mediation of Christ in Prayer

Theologian M. Shawn Copeland laments the many people and places that suffer ongoing crucifixion: To know and to follow Christ crucified is to know and

09/03/2026

“Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.” — Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”

Wendell Berry passed away this week at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. He was ninety-two. His daughter Mary confirmed his death and said, “There’s not enough I could say about him to do him justice.”¹

I understand that feeling myself. Berry has been a companion to me for years. He was a poet, novelist, essayist, farmer, activist, and teacher. I would also call him a theologian, even if he never used that title. He spent his life asking important questions about how we live on this Earth, how we treat each other, what our economies say about our values, and whether we can see creation as a gift instead of just a resource. Berry’s theology had dirt under its fingernails.

After spending years studying, traveling, and teaching elsewhere, he came back to Kentucky and settled on a farm near Port Royal. He stayed there, farming, writing, raising a family, walking the same woods, and watching the same river. Many years later, he said life there moved “from one revelation to another,” because the place was still “inexhaustibly beautiful and wonderful.”

From his small part of Kentucky, Berry saw something our culture still seems to miss: we cannot separate the problems facing people from what we do to the Earth. In his 1970 essay “Think Little,” he wrote about war, racism, and environmental destruction, and said that “the separation of these three problems is artificial.” He believed their common source was “the mentality of greed and exploitation.” More than fifty years later, that sounds less like a comment and more like a prediction.

Berry saw industrial culture separate things that should stay connected. Food lost its link to soil. Consumers lost touch with farmers. Wealth lost its tie to responsibility. People lost their connection to the places that support them. He also believed Christianity often lost its connection to the material world.

In The Unsettling of America, he said modern industrial society is built on “radical disconnections” between body and soul, marriage and community, and community and Earth.² His life’s work was putting the relationships back together.

He famously wrote, “Eating is an agricultural act.”³ With those words, dinner becomes a kind of theology. The food on our plate connects us to soil, water, weather, farmers, animals, labor, transportation, and choices about how we treat the Earth.

Berry thought Christianity should make us pay attention to those relationships. In a 2004 interview, he said that if Christians really believed the scriptures teach we live by God’s breath and exist in God, the effects on our economy would be “just devastating.” He argued that faith should lead to “an entirely generous and careful economic life.”⁴

If the world shares in the breath of God, then no decision is just about economics. How we farm matters. How we work matters. How we spend money matters. What we take from the Earth matters. What we throw away matters.

Berry also learned something important from Buddhism. He once said that learning about the Buddhist idea of Right Livelihood filled “a huge hole” in the Christianity he knew. Your spiritual life cannot be separated from how you make a living or what your work asks of the world.

His prophetic voice was sometimes fierce because he saw what exploitation leads to. “Exploitation leads, with perfect logic, to exhaustion,” he said.

We know that exhaustion now. We see it in soil worn out by industrial farming, in warming oceans, and in mountains stripped bare. We see it in tired workers and parents, in communities that have lost their strength, and in lives focused on consuming but never feeling satisfied.

Berry didn’t give us a big plan to fix everything. His answers were always local. Grow something. Get to know your neighbors. Care for a place. Protect the soil. Make things with care. Accept limits. Do work that doesn’t harm the things life depends on. And when despair came, he went outside.

In “The Peace of Wild Things,” Berry admitted that he too sometimes woke at night frightened about the world and his children’s future. His response was to go where the heron fed and the wood drake rested. There, beneath what he called the “day-blind stars,” he could “rest in the grace of the world.” He wasn’t running from reality. He was returning to a reality bigger than despair.

That may be the Berry teaching I need most now. He spent decades warning us about what was coming, lived to see much of it happen, and kept planting anyway. He kept farming. He kept writing. He kept loving one particular place. He kept insisting that another way of living remained possible.

He also left us with a message that feels almost like a blessing for this moment: “Practice resurrection.”⁵

Wendell Berry has returned to the Earth he loved. Now his work belongs to us. And there is still planting to do.

~ Rev. Cameron Trimble

A Meditation by Rev. Cameron Trimble

09/03/2026

Faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ. - Romans 10:17 (NRSV)

That’s a bold statement for someone who never met Jesus or heard him teach in the flesh.

Paul was not a disciple. In fact, Paul was a fierce opponent of the Jesus movement before he became its foremost promoter in Gentile territory.

However, Paul’s status as a “promoter of the Jesus movement” needs a mountain-sized asterisk.

The Christ he preached grew from a vision he never describes in his letters. The famous scene of Paul blinded by the light comes from Acts, written decades later by Luke.

Think about that. The most influential theologian in Christian history based his understanding of Jesus on a private experience, one he did not submit for peer review by Jesus’s appointed successors for three years. He intentionally avoided them. He said his spiritual experience outranked their human experience, so why bother?

Imagine someone claiming to have received a vision of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King that outranks the lived experience of those in Dr. King’s inner circle. Unlike King, Jesus left behind nothing but students—exactly who Paul dodged.

Because Paul answered only to his experience of Christ, Christ-ianity does the same by viewing Jesus through Paul rather than the other way around.

Yeah, I’m not exactly Paul’s biggest fan. But I’ll give him this: He had chutzpah, which is why you are reading this and why we have a church at all. Whatever my qualms with Paul, I’ll be forever grateful for his legacy: the Church that protects and proclaims the words of Jesus.

Paul got us here. The Gospels point us to Jesus.

Prayer
Help me balance my vision of Christ by attending to his words.

~ Matt Laney, Co-Pastor of Virginia Highland Church UCC in Atlanta, GA for UCC Stillspeaking Daily Devotional

09/03/2026

09/02/2026

Open Table Update 09/2/2026 - https://mailchi.mp/f81f43787fa2/open-table-update-8352933
Holy Mystery,
Today our hearts turn toward Nepal.
We hold the families who are waiting for news and all those sitting beside an empty chair wondering whether the person they love will ever come home.
We remember those who died.
Be with those searching through mud and rubble.
And be with those whose grief is only beginning.
May the suffering of this moment awaken in us a greater commitment to protect this beautiful, fragile world and one another.

09/01/2026

The Mobile Bay Sierra Club invites you a presentation on Tuesday, September 1st by Jack LeCroy, Regional Extension Agent and Master Gardener Coordinator. Mr. LeCroy will present "Gardening with Purpose: Native Plants, Pollinators, and Extension Resources “.
This will be a great opportunity to learn more, ask questions, and connect with others who share a love for nature and our beautiful state. We hope to see you there for an evening of conversation about conservation.
When: Tuesday, September 1
5:30 p.m. Refreshments
6:00 p.m. Presentation
Where: AWF Delta & Bay Conservation Center Theater
30954 Five Rivers Boulevard, Spanish Fort, AL

The Mobile Bay Sierra Club invites you a presentation on Tuesday, September 1st by Jack LeCroy, Regional Extension Agent and Master Gardener Coordinator. Mr. LeCroy will present "Gardening with Purpose: Native Plants, Pollinators, and Extension Resources “.

This will be a great opportunity to learn more, ask questions, and connect with others who share a love for nature and our beautiful state. We hope to see you there for an evening of conversation about conservation.

When: Tuesday, September 1
5:30 p.m. Refreshments
6:00 p.m. Presentation

Where: AWF Delta & Bay Conservation Center Theater
30954 Five Rivers Boulevard, Spanish Fort, AL

08/31/2026

A Prayer For Those Waiting in Nepal

Holy Mystery,

Today our hearts turn toward Nepal.

We hold the families who are waiting for news, the parents searching for children, the children searching for parents, and all those sitting beside an empty chair wondering whether the person they love will ever come home.

We remember those who died.

Each one carried a whole world within them. They had people they loved, work left unfinished, plans for tomorrow, stories only they could tell.

May their memory be held tenderly.

Be with those searching through mud and rubble. Strengthen rescue workers, medical teams, neighbors, monks, spiritual communities, government officials and ordinary people who have become caregivers because the moment demanded it of them.

And be with those whose grief is only beginning.

May we resist the temptation to explain their suffering from a distance. Help us instead to accompany it.

The mountains remind us that we are temporary.

The rivers remind us that we are connected.

The changing climate reminds us that our actions travel farther than we imagine.

Give us the courage to live accordingly.

May our awareness of death make us more alive.

May our grief deepen our compassion.

May our compassion become action.

And may the suffering of this moment awaken in us a greater commitment to protect this beautiful, fragile world and one another.

Amen
~ Rev. Cameron Trimble

A Meditation by Rev. Cameron Trimble

08/31/2026

Father Richard considers how Jesus’s choice to go to the cross reveals God’s solidarity with suffering:

When we try to live in solidarity with the pain of the world—and don’t spend our lives running from necessary suffering—we will encounter various “crucifixions.” Many say pain is physical discomfort, but suffering comes from our resistance, denial, and sense of injustice or wrongness about that pain. I know that is very true for me. This is the core meaning of suffering on one level or another, and we all learn it the hard way. Pain is the rent we pay for being human, it seems, but suffering is usually optional. The cross was Jesus’s voluntary acceptance of undeserved suffering as an act of total solidarity with the pain of the world. Reflecting on this mystery of love can change our lives.

I think the acceptance of that invitation to solidarity with the larger pain of the world is what it means to be “a Christian.” It takes great inner freedom to be a follower of Jesus. His life is an option, a choice, a call, a vocation for us, and we are totally free to say yes or no or maybe. We do not have to do this to make God love us. That is already taken care of. We do it to love God back and to love what God loves and how God loves! We either are baptized “into his death” and “resurrection” (Romans 6:3; Philippians 3:10–12), or Christianity is largely a mere belonging system, not a transformational system that will change the world.

The “crucified God” as personified in Jesus revealed that God is always on the side of suffering wherever it is found, including the wounded and dying troops on both sides in every kind of war, and both the victims and the oppressors of this world; frankly, this pleases very few people. Our resistance to suffering is an entire industry now, perhaps symbolized by the total power of the gun lobby and the permanent war economy in the United States, the fear of any profit sharing with the poor, or the need to be constantly entertained. Maybe that is why some have said that the foundational virtue underlying all others is courage (cor-agere, an action of the heart). It takes immense courage to walk in solidarity with the suffering of others, and even our own. [1]

If God is somehow participating in human suffering, instead of just passively tolerating it and observing it, that changes everything—at least for those who are willing to “gaze” contemplatively. All humble, suffering souls learn this from God, but the Christian Scriptures named it and revealed it publicly and dramatically in Jesus.

We can’t do it alone at all, but only by a deep identification with the Crucified One and crucified humanity. Jesus then does it in us, through us, with us, and for us. Then we have become a “new creation” (Galatians 6:15), a true disciple of Jesus, and a very different kind of human being. [2]

[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi (Franciscan Media, 2024), 21, 22–23, 24.

[2] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media, 2022), 202, 203, 223.

God’s love for you is unwavering, unconditional, and ever-present! In Eager to Love, Richard Rohr reminds us that God’s love is unconditional. When we allow this truth to permeate our lives, the desire to share God’s love grows in our hearts, leading us outward toward each other in service and...

08/30/2026

The Season of Creation begins on September 1, also called Creation Day. The month-long season runs to October 4, the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi.

When I lead conferences to help church folks understand generational differences regarding faith, one comment comes up at nearly every event — that young adults seem more invested in spending time in nature than in church. Several surveys have discovered that observation is generally true, and it is particularly the case in regions with great natural beauty. A 2015 Baylor University study discovered that places with “more beautiful weather and scenery have lower rates of membership and affiliation with religious organizations.”

Such comments aren’t usually just observations, however. They are often complaints or criticism, bemoaning the lack of commitment on the part of those who skip religious services in favor of hiking or kayaking or biking on the sabbath. It can be hard not to criticize the critics, because I have a lot of sympathy with those greeting the sunrise on a mountaintop or by the ocean.

Sometimes I reply to these skeptics with a question, “Where did Moses find God?”

The story from Exodus on Moses and the burning bush is one of the most important in Jewish tradition. It relates Moses encountering God – the One who commissions him liberate the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt and reveals to him the sacred Name.

None of this happened in a temple or a religious building. The setting was the wilderness, the “desolation” — a mountain, a burning bush, holy ground. This encounter is unimaginable in a city, a comfortable, settled place. Nature is necessary to the tale. The wilderness underscores its primal wildness — a man, unsettled in his own identity, meets the One who is both Being and Becoming, and learns of his own destiny.

Few words echo through the ages as profoundly as God’s directive to Moses: Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.

Holy ground. The same soil from which God created Adam — the sacred dust of our very being. Take off your shoes. Feel the earth underfoot, your toes in the sand or mud or loam, the stuff of creation. The burning bush, the unexpected blaze, may catch your attention, but the truth of the matter is that you are standing on hallowed humus. Hear the name: “I am who I am.”

Moses is tasked to free God’s people from slavery, to lead them out of Egypt. And, instead of founding some rival empire to that of Pharaoh, with great temples and pyramids, the Burning Bush directs Moses to bring the people back to the mountain, to worship at this place, and to settle in a good and broad land, a place of “milk and honey,” where they will work fertile fields and live by faith, with generosity and gratitude. The arc of this story takes us from wilderness to encounter, from misplaced vocation to true calling, from empire to dwelling, from desolation to fruitfulness.

The story is about Moses, and specifically, it is the beginning of the covenant God makes with Israel through the commandments. But it also holds universal meanings. Moses, in effect, stands on that ground as a human being, a representative of every one of us. This Jewish event is also a profound moment for humanity — the Creator-God’s self-naming, kindling not only the bush but the soil itself with sacredness and justice.

Can you imagine the way this event seared itself into Moses’ memory? It must have transformed his awareness of both God and the ground under his feet. Indeed, everything shifted that day.

Those words — the place on which you are standing is holy ground — surely never left him. What if we let them haunt us, too? What if we recalled them daily? How would they change who we are, our experience of God, and how we act toward the Earth? How we act toward others?

What does it mean to be a people standing on holy ground?

There’s no better story with which to begin the Season of Creation than this. We are all standing on holy ground. We need to remember that every, single day.

~ Diana Butler Bass

Holy Ground

08/30/2026

On Boston Common you will find a statue in memory of Mary Dyer, a middle-aged Quaker mother of six who was hanged in 1660 before a crowd of churchgoers and civic leaders bent on safeguarding their "Godly" order against her seditious belief in the "inner light."

So I am no fan of the "good old days" of state-sponsored religion, or of the religious arrogance that says, "Our truth is the only truth." I want neither to violate the separation of church and state nor to encourage people who would impose their religious beliefs on others.

~ Parker Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy

Join us for adult education our in the parlor of All Saints Episcopal on Sunday, August 30 at 9:30 am.

All are welcome!