October 29, 2017
The memento I brought for the service today is an old high school yearbook, published in 1927. Among the senior class pictures is one of an attractive young woman known as “Lottie.” I never even knew she had that name until I discovered the book after she’d died, and I was helping clean out the house in which she’d lived for much of her life.
October 15, 2017
Today I want to bring this matter of class closer to home. Home in this case being our Unitarian Universalist movement, and this congregation as a part of that movement—our UU Association. I’ll be drawing in part on a report that came out last summer, just prior to our UU General Assembly, by our Association’s Commission of Appraisal titled Class Action: The Struggle with Class in Unitarian Universalism. And I’ll be throwing in some of my own stuff as well.
October 1, 2017
“Where is our Holy Church? Where race and class unite.” When these lines appear in our hymnal there’s a question mark after the words “Holy Church.” “Where race and class unite…” is offered as a response to the question. Perhaps that question mark is misplaced. Or maybe those words should be offered as a vision or goal we’ve not yet reached but still aspire to—be it in our UU congregations or in society at large. It’s not an easy topic, but one we can ill afford to ignore on either level.
September 17, 2017
When I offered my “Kick Off the Year” sermon from this pulpit one year ago this Sunday I assumed I was leading into my final year with you. I’d say there’s an object lesson there on not relying too heavily on one’s assumptions. Sometimes they can fool you.
June 11, 2017
“I have learned that the read church can be defined as our most intimate relationships: How we smile and trust each other; How we talk and touch each other; How we share and protect each other; How we welcome new friends and forgive old enemies; How we love each other—in all the myriad ways that love can be expressed. That is the church.” — Rev David Rankin
June 4, 2017
“This is the highest activity of your mind and heart, this Oneness…to see all the relations and the connections between all objects, forces, peoples, and creatures…This is why all great religions preach the central idea of Oneness.” — Woodie Guthrie
May 28, 2017
“…the true measure of our lives is about how we touch and guide and nurture the lives of others as we are given opportunity to do so. “
May 14, 2017
What these two women [Julie Ward Howe and Anna Jarvis]—from widely differing stations in life—had in common, then, was a vision and a desire for a reconciled human family. This is the vision we should all be striving towards in whatever great or small ways we can, using whatever means and resources are available to us.
April 16, 2017
…when it comes to the rhythms of our lives, in all their great glory and in all their deep tragedy, we are the ones who must be agents of resurrection. We are the ones who still have to reawaken when our bars of the spirit are lifted. We are the ones who have to do the shaping in order that we may fulfill the promises of our own lives.
April 9, 2017
I do believe in resurrection, of a sort. I believe as do most Christians and non-Christians alike in keeping alive the Jewish Galilean prophet’s subversive wisdom. While I no longer adhere to the doctrines that have come to make up the religion about Jesus–doctrines he never promulgated himself–I find much that is worthy in the religion of Jesus. And I’m grateful for the role that our Unitarian and Universalist forebears played in making that distinction.