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!”

[this sermon was prefaced by stories submitted by members of the congregation]

When someone learns that I’m pastor of a church their follow up questions fall into a couple predictable patterns. The inquirer either asks demographic and geographic questions–where is that, how many members do you have, how long has the church been there/how long have you been there?

As I begin preaching I invite you to imagine meme after meme scrolling across 21st-century, high-tech, integrated video screens here in the sanctuary:

*Black text from Lutheran pastor, memoirist and public theologian Nadia Bolz-Weber on rainbow colored background: Yearly reminder: there is no resolution that, if kept, will make you more worthy of love. You, as your actual self not as some made up ideal, is already worthy.

Today is the first of December. I haven’t even opened the first door on my Advent calendar of tea–one of many secular ways of counting down toward Christmas. And we’ve only just lit the first Advent candle on this the first Sunday of Advent–a more religious means of tracking the days until to Christmas. And I’m already grumpy.

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.

My friend Lisa’s dad died this week just past. “It was peaceful,” she said. “We’re relieved for him. And sad...”

I remember well that mingled relief and sadness when my own dad died many years ago. Dad had already been on my mind before I got Lisa’s text.

My colleague, friend, role model, Mike Mather signs his correspondence “keep tellin’ the story.” Since he always writes “the story” not “a story” I think he must have a particular story in mind, though I’ve never known him to specify one.

We’ve got the whole world in our hands.

And we’ve had it in our hands, to some extent, all these 300,000 years since our species evolved into existence upon the earth. I don’t know enough biology or natural history to say definitively, but it seems to me we might say that homo sapiens appearance was the beginning of a trophic cascade that continues still today.

Perhaps you remember a scene in the movie Baby Boom. It’s one that often comes to my mind at Water Ceremony time. The former New Yorker, not yet adjusted to life on her rural Vermont homestead, is told that her well is dry.

At the board retreat last Saturday, one of our UUCS board members said, “In order to plan for this year and beyond, we need to know how many members we want to have. And what kind of members do we want to have? ”

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.

Poet Jennifer Grotz wrote:

"Summer specializes in time, slows it down almost to dream.

…

Summer lingers, but it’s about ending. It’s about how things redden and ripen and burst and come down."

Some of you here today and others who sit in our sanctuary or attend our services on YouTube, like some folks who participate in other Unitarian Universalist churches, were raised in our tradition.

Arlo Guthrie tells a story about performing with Pete Seeger at a three day folk festival in Denmark, in the early years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. 30,000 people from both sides of the former Iron Curtain showed up, many of them drawn by the novelty of being able to travel where they wanted to travel, even across national borders.

Do you remember the Tiger Mom hoopla just over a decade ago? A Yale Law professor, Amy Chua, published a book titled Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom, contrasting Western parenting styles and Chinese parenting style, and the public response all but broke the internet.

This sermon had several titles on the way to today. Can She Say That Here? Can They Say That Here? And finally Can We Say That Here? These are related but distinct questions.