Rev. Timothy Haut is the Co-Pastor of the Deep River (CT) Congregational Church and has served as an active UCC pastor for 52 years. He is also a husband, father, poet, author, grower of tomatoes, pie maker, and dog walker.
Scripture: John 15:9-17 (NRSV)
9As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. 10If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. 11I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.
12“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. 16You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. 17I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.
Reflection: Abide in My Love
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Love isn’t just something we do, John reminds us. It’s the air we breathe, the blood in our veins. In the end, it bubbles up in joy. Our laughter, Ann Lamott says, is “carbonated holiness.” Our churches should be full of it. Frederick Buechner says, “We are above all things loved,” and so we “should come together like people who have just won the Irish Sweepstakes. It should have us throwing our arms around each other” (Secrets in the Dark, p. 241).
It is love that will save us.
WHAT WILL SAVE US
Love is what will save us
in the end,
when we have finished our fumbling
toward happiness or success,
when we are too tired to fight or struggle,
when the old enemies are gone or forgotten,
when the world itself, broken and fearful,
waits for some new day.
We will breathe a small prayer of gratitude
for the blessings we did not deserve,
for rain and Spring and lilacs,
and arms that held us on a dark night,
for a song that came to rest in our heart,
or a child who trusted in our goodness.
And we will rest in that prayer,
and in the hope that something in our life
was bright and true enough to endure,
never knowing that some kind act of ours,
some gift we gave out of sheer joy,
some simple word of sympathy or understanding,
some anger we restrained or silence kept
was surely the love,
most holy, most true,
that helped to heal the world.
--Timothy Haut
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PRAYER
Embrace us, immerse us, bless us, Holy God! For in your love we live and move and have our being. Let that love flow into us and out of us like light from a star, so that joy may brighten our world and your heart. Amen
New Prayer Requests:
We ask churches and church leaders to join us in the following prayers either by sharing them during worship, printing them in bulletins, or sharing them in some other way. To make a prayer request, please contact Marlene Gasdia-Cochrane at cochranem@sneucc.org.
Prayers of Intercession:
- For the people of Ukraine and the Middle East whose lives continue to be shattered by war, as well as the many landscapes that are currently embroiled in conflicts .
- For those grieving or suffering due to the ~5,100 gun violence deaths that happened in the US since the start of the year.
- For survivors of sexual assault.
Prayers of Joy and Thanksgiving:
This Week in History:
May 1, 1915 (109 years ago): The International Congress of Women, also referred to as the Women’s Peace Conference, adopts its resolutions on peace and women’s suffrage. [History]
“Study the past if you would define the future.”
— Confucius
