By Pastor Phil Haslanger (Please feel free to email a response or a question)
April 19, 2009
Isaiah 43: 18-21; Revelation 21: 1-6; Micah 6: 6-8

More light, more truth, is breaking from your Word.
More light, more truth, Holy Spirit, elp us hear what needs to be heard.
(from a hymn by Christopher Grundy)

This congregation has had a way of finding itself in the midst of troubled times and then creating something amazing out of them.  Maybe that’s why the two readings that we used 20 years ago in dedicating this building and that you heard again today have such resonance for Memorial United Church of Christ.

Isaiah was writing his hopeful words as the Jewish community was seeing its exile in Babylon coming to an end some 540 years before the birth of Jesus. They had been taken from their homeland three generations earlier, made to live in a foreign land, cut off from their religious traditions and institutions. They had to create a new way to relate to God and to each other. And now they were going to make a fresh start.


“Do not remember the former things or the things of old,” Isaiah writes as if God were speaking. “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth. Do you not perceive it?”

When this congregation was founded in 1917, it was a thriving time in Madison, but it was a complicated time in the world. The U.S. was entering World War I.  The Swiss Reformed people from New Glarus and its environs who had moved to Madison were worshipping at the German Presbyterian Church, but that was on the verge of being disbanded. 
Out of this turmoil, a new community began to form and by June 10, 1917, the 64 people who gathered at a hall for Civil War veterans just off the Square in Madison launched Memorial Reformed Church.

The community worshipped for about a decade in a house on East Johnson Street, just behind where Bethel Lutheran Church now stands.  In 1930, they began building an actual church. But 1930 was not a very good year to start building something.  There was that Great Depression wreaking havoc with the economy and the church never got beyond a refurbishing of the basement of the house.

The next big move came in 1942 when the congregation shifted along with the movement of the population in the city. The people of that era built a church on Madison Street, near the University of Wisconsin Field House.  Remember, 1942 was in the midst of World War II.  This was not exactly an auspicious time for such a bold move, either. But the people of that time trusted that God would be with them as they tried a new thing.  The congregation thrived in its new location.


Then, as the population of the city shifted and the culture changed during the 1960s and 1970s, the congregation of Memorial was aging and new members were not coming in. The number of children dwindled.  And the congregation faced a very difficult choice. Should they hang on to the former things, live with their memories of the things of old, or try one more time to put their trust in God and try a new thing?

The fact that we are all here today is a testament to their gutsiness and their trust in God.

The vision that the writer of the Book of Revelation sketched out in this last chapter in the Bible is pretty grandiose.  It’s worth knowing that this book was also written in a time of deep distress.

The Roman Empire was coming down hard on this new Christian sect that would not bow down to Caesar.  The Book of Revelation is a subversive document undermining the Roman claims of divine authority and ultimately offering this picture of a new heaven and a new earth, when God is with all people, wiping away every tear from their eyes, making all things new.


So here we are, standing on the shoulders of those who have come before us,
people willing to take a chance in tough times,
trusting that their God would be with them,
willing to work together with God’s grace to create that new thing
that would enable them to gather as a community of believers
and then go out and make a difference in the world.

That, after all, is the other part of the history of this congregation – making a difference in the world.  

Back in 1921, this infant congregation started what was called a Women’s Missionary Society, which sent four people to Japan in the 1920s.  The Women’s Guild in the 1930s and 1940s helped support an orphanage and the Sewing Guild made lap robes for various institutions around Madison.

Jon Schultz and members of Memorial helped create a whole batch of services for the people of this area and took bold public stands in the 1970 and 1980s.


You’ve heard that theme continued here this morning.  If you haven’t already done so, look at the more than two pages in your bulletins filled with just some of the groups that members of our congregation support with their time and money.  You know the things we have done collectively for Luke House, Allied Drive, Interfaith Hospitality, Leopold Elementary School, Back Bay, Christmas Lutheran Church. But individually, we also do a tremendous amount and I hope that is inspired in part by what happens here when we gather together for worship.


You heard Fred Trost in the video from 20 years ago challenge us to look through these windows to the needs of the world beyond this sanctuary. 

If we get a glimpse in here of the new heaven and the new earth that the writer of Revelation was talking about, then we have a chance to be God’s agents in creating that new heaven and new earth out there.

As another Hebrew prophet named Micah wrote, what God wants from us is not a lot of ritual. The rituals we have here are important for us to nurture our spirits. But what God asks of us is to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with our God.

We ought to celebrate this day the beauty of this place where we gather for worship and for learning and for a common life.  We ought to honor those who have made this possible and who have tended it over the years.

But we know we can’t leave here simply reveling in a remarkable history. We now are the makers of the next chapters in our story and the new thing we are creating is a place where we all can do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with our God.


So let’s take a moment to sing praises of that God, using a hymn our predecessors sang as they dedicated that church on Madison Street in 1942. It’s a hymn that has deep roots in our tradition. It’s #277 in our hymnals. Please rise in body or in spirit and sing verses one and three of “Holy, Holy, Holy.”