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.

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.

Prior to this week, when Megan introduced me to Sleeping Beauty: A Midcentury Fairytale, my favorite version of the old tale came from The Barefoot Book of Princesses.

Early on in my ministry in South Bend, Indiana, the pastor of a quite conservative, local, independent church invited me to be a guest at an adult Christian education class.

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.

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.

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.

Back in November, just after All Saints and All Souls Days, I preached another sermon called We’re All in This Together. I spoke of the continuity of love on both sides of the grave, and I reminded us that sooner or later we all belong to a community of everyone who has ever loved someone who has died. A vast and all encompassing circle of mourners.

Once upon a time my daughter learned a catchy little song at Chalice Camp–a Unitarian Universalist day camp. The lyrics, by Laila Ibrahim, come as close to a UU catechism as anything I’ve ever encountered:

It’s blessing each of us was born.

It matters what we do with our lives.

What each of us knows about God is a piece of the truth.

We don’t have to do it alone.

I saw a made for TV movie once that told the story of two women who had catastrophic medical events. A stereotypically ordinary suburban wife and mother had a massive aneurysm.