 Greetings, friends! Welcome to CTUCC Conference Cast for December 24, 2013, the regular podcast of the Connecticut Conference of the United Church of Christ. Whoever you are and wherever you may be on life's journey at this very moment, you are welcome here. We begin this week's conference cast with this meditation from the Reverend Barbara J. Libby, Interim Associate Conference Minister for Clergy Concerns. On this Christmas Eve, our scripture text is that familiar story in the second chapter of Luke, in which Jesus is born in a Bethlehem stable far from home, in which angels sing to shepherds on a hillside, and in which Mary holds all these things in her heart. This week's Luke text is so familiar we could probably all recite it from memory. So rather than trying to interpret the text, I'm choosing to share some poetry. With permission, I'm sharing a poem entitled Cat by Reverend Timothy Hout. In this season of Unexpected Visitors, a gray and white cat has come lurking in the barn, peering through the bushes, and at last waiting at the back door. It may be a neighbor's pet out for a stroll, but I have heard that stray cats will go quietly from house to house for weeks or months before they choose that single best place to say, here I am, this is home, let me in. We are all wanderers searching through our years to find a place where we belong. This is our advent yearning, the call of candle, hearth, and table, of arms outstretched and laughter, of kindness, warmth, and rest, of love that welcomes most of all the lost son, the wounded daughter, the weary traveler at the end of the road, the cat with no place else to go. For a while here, we make a place to belong, a lodging with our pictures on the wall, a place to lay our head. But like Mary, Joseph, we are always summoned to leave familiar dwellings, to take some strange road to an unknown destination where there is a manger waiting, filled with holy light streaming through a crack in the wall of the world. In that brightness, we may see for a moment with cow and dove, donkey and cat, our one true home. There's a song in the air, there's a star in the sky, there's a mother's deep prayer, and a baby's low cry, and the star rains its fire while the beautiful sing, for the manger in Bethlehem cradles a king. Let us join our hearts in prayer. Oh, holy God, we give thanks for the Christmas story, the miracle of birth, a child born in a stable among cows and sheep. We give thanks for the most fragile of all life resting in the arms of loving parents. We give thanks that we can be filled again with wonder and with joy, wondering again what sort of God you are that came to us at Christmas and lived among us as a human person. We celebrate with joy that Christmas is finally upon us once again, that Jesus was and is born, and that he lived among us and lives among us still. We ask a special blessing upon all who read or hear this word. Help us to come close to you, oh God. Help us to open our hearts to your presence in all we do and say. Bless and keep those who are sick, hungry, homeless, or struggling this week. Bless those who live without safety or security, those who live in war-torn places, and who live without hope or joy in their lives. Be with us all this holy week. We pray in the name of a child born at Bethlehem. Emmanuel, God with us. Amen. We ask special prayers this week for Georgette Huey, a faith formation practitioner in this conference on the death of her mother Isabelle Huey in a traffic accident on December 19th. She was 84. In the news this week, we're highlighting some of the stories from the December issue of Contact Today. From the Niantic Community Church, UCC, we have a reflection from a self-described recovering atheist named Bill Frisky. When he started to feel a call to faith, he followed Google and the goofy grin of Pastor the Reverend John Nelson on the church website to a new relationship with God and this faith community. Here's some of what he wrote in his essay for the Church's Giving Campaign this year. As time went on, I found God wouldn't stop speaking to me in this church. One day about a year ago during last year's pledging season pastor John preached about the peace of Christ. I sat in the pews knowing what he said to be true but still aching with anxiety and agitation, and I said to myself that I would have to get some token to carry with me to remind me of this peace of Christ. Less than a minute later on the collection plate came a gift for us to take, a piece of fabric with a dove painted on it. I nearly cried. I have since passed it along to a young lady who needed it more than I, but at the time I knew I was hearing God. He spoke to me loud and clear. In Norwich, pastor of the Reverend Sarah Offner Seals closed up the church with a sense of disappointment one evening after a very small group came to see a documentary on hunger in America. But a few days later, one of those attending told her that she wanted to revive the church's tag sale and more than that she wanted all of its proceeds, all of them, to benefit the local soup kitchen. Along the way, right off to Seals, a few church members would occasionally pull me aside and ask why we weren't keeping the proceeds for the church more out of confusion than anger. This just isn't something people normally do, the director of the soup kitchen explained to me. But when it was done, the church had raised $3,400 for the program. They'd involved larger numbers of people than they'd expected, and they had seen God multiply their efforts in ways they had not imagined. We have two stories which involve recording and microphones. Since the Second Congregational Church UCC of New London left its building last summer and moved in with Crossroads Presbyterian Church in Waterford, Interim pastor the Reverend Matthew McCaffrey has been preserving members' memories with a portable recording studio they've taken to calling the Story Cube. One question McCaffrey always asks is how people found this particular church? There have been different pathways to Second Church Historic, he says, but everyone talks about a warm welcome that was followed up with inclusion and acts of kindness. Meanwhile, in West Suffield pastor the Reverend Eric Fistler, working on his own Sunday sermon, helps other preachers as well. Along with his United Methodist colleague, the Reverend Rob McCoy, he produces the Weekly Pulpit Fiction Podcast, in which the two review the scholarship around the upcoming week's revised common-electionary texts and offer some of their own thinking. We love the conversation, says Fistler, bringing clergy together. You'll find more on these stories, plus the many others in the recent contact, and all the current headlines by visiting our website at ctucc.org slash news. This is the season of the Friends of the Conference Annual Appeal. The conference is an extension of your local church ministry, enabling us to reach out in love to each other and to those in need. That is why we ask you to give generously, even sacrificially, to our Friends of the Conference campaign, so we can be in ministry together, transforming lives in the name of Christ. To be part of the new things we imagine God doing through us, visit us at ctucc.org slash donate. In the new year, Stepping Stones returns on January 14th, with past them the football, the care and support of volunteers in Southington. Basics of Christian Education, a new program that will enable participants to launch an effective faith formation ministry in their local church, runs three Saturdays, beginning January 18th. Hartford Seminary and Asylum Hill Congregational Church offer the Bible and the Quran on January 29th in Hartford. Comfort food for the journey to a day retreat for clergy women will be February 4th also in Hartford. Now set aside the first of March, when we'll hold Super Saturday, a day of workshops, fellowship and celebration for church members and leaders, and featuring a keynote address from author Diana Butler-Bass. We're holding this in concert with the Massachusetts Conference, so we'll be gathering in Ludlow, Massachusetts. Registration is open for the New England Women's Celebration to be held March 28th through 30th in Portland, Maine. There is a discount available for those who register before January 15th, so get that done now. Learn more at uccwomencelebration.org. You can always learn more about what's coming up in the Connecticut Conference by visiting us at ctucc.org slash events. We're going to turn to a conference cast tradition this year, closing this Christmas podcast with an additional reflection from your podcast host. The stories of Jesus' birth offer us a study in contrasts. Joseph, according to the genealogies offered by Matthew and Luke, comes from Israel's royal house, but Mary's child, hailed as a king, is not his natural son. Jesus is born in royal David City, as the hymn puts it, but he is born to visitors who come from afar. An unmarried couple whose shelter is a barn. Angels proclaim the divinity of the newborn child, but, strangely enough, they declare it to shepherds on a hillside. Wise men, astrologers, travel to see him and present him gifts, but because they had stopped to ask directions of King Herod, the family must flee, the gifts sold and the money spent to bring them to find refuge among Israel's traditional enemies in Egypt. It is not a tale of sweetness and light, it is a tale of strained relationships and distrust, of hard journeys taken urgently, of poverty and powerlessness and of deadly danger and violence. How else I wonder could the story of the Jesus who went to the cross truly begin? Because as our conference minister Kent Salotti said in his Christmas greetings last week, Jesus grew up. He grew up to turn the world upside down, to raise up the poor and cast down the proud. He came because people suffer. He came because people sin. He came because people hunger. He came because people grieve. Bethlehem's babe in a manger was the one who healed the sick, the one who turned aside judgment, the one who defied the powerful, the one who overcame death itself. So let these blessings come to you this Christmas to find sustenance for your body, mind and spirit, to be strengthened for giving and for serving, to renew your hope in this created universe, and to know the comfort of a loving, living God. May Christ's grace and love be with you this season and always. Thanks to boys in hats, David Jarvis and the New England Ringers for their musical contributions. And that brings this conference cast to a close. Thanks to Barbara Libby for her reflection and to GarageBand for our music. Primary funding for conference cast comes from your congregation's gifts to our church's wider mission, basic support, changing lives through the United Church of Christ. This is Eric Anderson, the Minister of Communications and Technology for the Connecticut Conference of the United Church of Christ, praying that your days this week may be filled with the presence, the guidance and the grace of God. This is Eric Anderson again with a program note. Thanks once more for listening to this special Christmas Eve release of conference cast. Our next program will be Thursday, January 2nd as we resume our regular schedule in the New Year. Have a very blessed Christmas and may your next trip around the sun bring you joys and wonders beyond your imagining. May God be with you always.