A few years ago, in the height of the COVID pandemic, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter Uprising, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, I asked my mentor in ministry if we were living in the end times.

A friend recently posted a short video on social media, showing herself interacting with a cat that had recently joined her household. In it Bridget can be heard to exclaim, “that’s unauthorized behavior!”

Tomorrow, it hardly needs to be said, our nation celebrates the birthday of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man who would be 96 today, if he hadn’t been assassinated at the age of 39–in the prime of his life and at the height of his public ministry.

Some of you are too young to remember an old sitcom called M*A*S*H. Aired from 1972 to 21983, it chronicled day to day life in a mobile army surgical hospital during the Korean War.

In 2014 a short piece ran on NPR:

"Can you hear the difference between hot and cold?

A British "sensory branding company" called Condiment Junkie wanted to know the answer.

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.

I am among what must be the last generation of former kids to have learned to read with Dick and Jane. The editions we studied–I was in first grade in 1970–gave Dick, Jane and younger sister, Sally, black friends.ppeared in 1930. …

When I read or hear or speak those words of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., about the inescapable network of mutuality, I often think about Jesus saying, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.’ Or sometimes the less eloquent adage “what goes around comes around.”

Congregational ministers, in my experience, spend a lot of time talking about how to attract and keep members. Way more time than we’d like to spend on that topic–for many reasons, both valid and questionable, all a subject for another sermon. Today I mention it only to say that in recent years one of the bits of wisdom we pass around in those conversations–with anecdotes from personal experience, or hearsay, or data points from organizations that study church growth–is that people come to faith communities looking for ways to be of service to the world.

Every once in a while I’m blown away by how contemporary some snippet of historical Unitarian Universalist thought sounds today. Even words I’ve known for years can surprise me from time to time by how applicable they are to the current moment.

As an intern minister thirty years ago I taught a course of the old adult RE curriculum Building Your Own Theology. During one session or another, I said with all the convocation and naivete of a new minister and a life-long Unitarian Universalist, “ we don’t have to accept narrow, fundamentalist definitions that deprive us of rich religious language.

I probably won’t be with you in the parade tomorrow–not physically. I need to help transport the Savannah State choir to the church for the concert, and the end of the parade is too close to the start of the concert. But I’ll be with you in spirit. And, in fact, I’m already there in my imagination.

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."