Increasingly, Christmas seems like a holiday with not much to celebrate, stuck between Black Friday and New Year’s. This Sunday, amid the year’s grief and uncertainty, we will preach about Joy. What is Joy, anyway? How might we enjoy this pinnacle of human experience from within the depths of misery, disappointment and unhappiness? Don’t worry. … Continue reading “Joy: Always, Already and Not Yet”

The Exodus narrative presents many challenges to modern understanding, especially for us liberals, steeped as we are in the “historical critical method” of biblical interpretation. So, as Channing recommends, let’s “taste and see” what might resonate for contemporary Unitarian Universalists facing the challenges of our time.   Join us for online worship at uusociety.org/worship-and-music/online-sunday-worship/ at 10 … Continue reading “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round”

My father died when I was sixteen, so for me the parental voice resounding through the title of today’s sermon, more often than not, belonged to my mother. I’ve made my dad up by “self-parenting”: remembering, retelling, and applying stories about my father to my own growing up, and my own experience of parenting.  Join … Continue reading Father’s Day – “Walk Like You Got Somewhere to Go”

If Wisdom is somehow distilled from experience, what Wisdom can we bring to the climate crisis, as a species, when we have few relevant experiences to rely on? This morning, we’re going to recall trees we love or lost, tell a few jokes, and think about a sustaining moral ecology for the times ahead.

Leonard Cohen wrote somewhere that a huge chunk of life is “full of dulling and forgetting. …[W]e lose the gift of speech with animals, … birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse.” Let this holiday season encourage us to explore how human experiences of awe and wonder, fear and mystery, as experienced perhaps by … Continue reading “Awesome!”