Sunday, January 2, 2011: Come anytime after 9:30 a.m. as we welcome the New Year with juice, coffee, and pastries. Our service will begin at 10:30 a.m. and we will share poetry and readings and any thoughts, hopes and dreams you have for 2011. Bring a favorite poem to read if you wish, and any holiday food you’d like help finishing off!
Sunday, January 16, 2011 “Let Justice Roll” Rev. Dr. Dorothy Emerson, guest minister
In celebration of the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, we will consider his work on economic justice and what his leadership might challenge and inspire us to do today.
The Rev. Dr. Dorothy May Emerson is a Unitarian Universalist community minister with Rainbow Solutions in Medford, Massachusetts, where she focuses on spirituality, money, and justice. She consults with organizations, such as Promise the Children, and is the coordinator of the Margaret Fuller Bicentennial. A life member of the NAACP, she served as president of the Mystic Valley Area Branch. Her books include Standing Before Us: Unitarian Universalist Women and Social Reform 1776-1936 and Glorious Women: Award-Winning Sermons about Women. Most recently she edited and co-created a new curriculum entitled Becoming Women of Wisdom: Marking the Passage into the Crone Years.
We will be working on the pageant.
We will practice readings and make some posters.
We are once again in the midst of Advent, the Christian season of waiting for the coming of Jesus. But it’s about more than just waiting; it’s also about journeying, and taking leaps of faith. The Advent Season is about the hope and expectation that we can make our world better. It is about being attentive to the opportunities transform ourselves and the world. But no matter how positive, transformation is scary.
I sometimes imagine how scared young Mary must have been when, according to the nativity legend in the Gospel of Luke, the angel Gabriel came to her. Gabriel said, “Be ye not afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and … He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there will be no end.”
Be ye not afraid? But that all sounds perfectly terrifying! (more…)
At sundown today, the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah begins. And each year when Hanukkah comes, I find myself thinking of miracles. Unitarian Universalism is often thought of as a religion of reason, and some might wonder if we have any use or place for miracles in our tradition. What is a miracle, anyway?
As I mentioned to you last year, the great Jewish theologian Martin Buber once described miracles as awe-inspiring natural events recorded “by extremely enthusiastic participants”. More recently (in a 2007 Newsweek web article) Rabbi Marc Gellman wrote about “a wonderful old Jewish legend [found in the Talmud] … that some of the people who walked through the Red Sea in the Exodus from Egypt did not see the miracle of the splitting of the sea because they never looked up”. These people walked right through the Red Sea as it was parted, but they never even looked up! They never saw a miracle. And so instead (as Gellman puts it) “all they saw was mud.” As Gellman writes, is it not possible that we humans were “put here on planet earth so that we might look up” and that miraculous (or seemingly miraculous) events might happen now and then “so that all our vistas might not be mud?” (more…)
