Your Choice
When I pulled a 36 year old meditation manual off my shelf this week, looking for this morning’s reading by Jane Ranney Rzepka, I didn’t remember that it included specific mention of the winter holidays, and more specifically still, how they are celebrated in many Unitarian Universalist churches.
The Act of Waiting
Did any of you walk into church today and see the Advent candles surrounded by greenery where only last week we displayed our harvest of blessings, and mutter “Oh, no! Not Christmas already!”
Animal Souls, Human Souls
"In days of old, animals believed
humans to likewise have a soul"
I love bits of prose, poetry, movie dialogue or song lyrics that turn our expectations upside down or inside out–such as those lines from today's call to worship by Annette C. Boehm, who translated them from the German herself. If we’ve thought about it all, we might debate whether or not there is some irreducible, inextinguishable bit of human existence that might be called a soul? Or have wondered, do animals have souls? Such ponderings are familiar to me.
Course Locked In
I ended last Sunday’s sermon with these words:
"these times call us to heed the lessons of the cycle of earth’s seasons… each in its time. Let us be eager and unwavering in our pursuit of the remedies nature’s ways might teach us, fearless and joyful in turning our learning into action for the transformation and salvation of the world.”
Might As Well Flower
'Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.'
What If
Antoine de Saint-Exupe´, the French aviator and writer best known for the The Little Prince, wrote, “The theoretician believes in logic[,] and believes that he despises dream, intuition, and poetry. He does not recognize that these three fairies have only disguised themselves in order to dazzle him….He does not know that he owes his greatest discoveries to them.”
Will the Net Appear?
Leap, and the net will appear. Or will it?
In just a moment I’m going to ask you to raise your hands indicating your agreement with one of three statements.
Awaiting the Birth of the Divine
I observe some Unitarian Universalist-tinged version of Advent every winter. I observe it in my home–usually lighting the candles and reading from texts both ancient and contemporary– because my parents observed it in my childhood home with the lighting of candles and readings from texts both ancient and contemporary.
Our Assignment
A person was being chased by a tiger. The tiger chased them straight to the edge of the cliff. They grabbed a strong vine and began to lower themselves to the bottom–before noticing another tiger waiting below.
Given Into Their Care But Not Theirs Alone
Let us sing the new world in this is how it all begins*
Really, Carrie Newcomer, composer and lyricist of this morning’s anthem, preached the only sermon necessary for a Coming of Age Sunday service with those two phrases:
Let us sing the new world in/this is how it all begins.
Mysterioso
Sophie proclaims her Auntie Claus. And really, that is the word not just for his fabulous sister but for Santa Claus, too. So many mysteries–how does that elevator get from a New York City penthouse to the North Pole? What exactly does Auntie do from Halloween to Valentine’s Day? Santa declares he couldn’t be ready for Christmas without her help but we don’t see her in the mailroom. Is she sequestered in package wrapping, where Sophia never quite makes it?
Out of Emptiness…Everything
Someone once, during Holy Week, made a not-altogether-complimentary reference to “Lisa and her little hopes.”
I suppose hope is one of the central virtues and perhaps weaknesses not just, as it is sometimes said, of liberal theology in general, but of my own personal theology as well. I don’t ignore the long night that must precede the dawn or the gaping emptinesses that sometimes overtake us when previously whole lives are cracked.
Born This Day
Surely there are cloudy Christmas Days, and snowy ones. And of course Christmas Eve lasts twenty-four hours, many of them in daylight. But in my mind Christmas Eve is always nighttime, and Christmas Day is always a sunny, sparkling morning.
Invitation into Hope and Struggle
Many years, especially as a new minister, at the approach of the Winter Solstice, as the days grew shorter still, the nights longer, and we waited, waited, waited, for the earth’s angle in relationship to the sun to shift, I would say, light-heartedly yet seriously, that Arlo Guthrie is right: "you can’t have a light without a dark to stick it in."