SERMONS
FROM THE UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH OF MANCHESTER, NEW HAMPSHIRE
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We can look at time as something circular that simply repeats, round and round, nothing ever really new. Or we can look at it historically, ever harking backward for what’s best and true. But there’s a third way, which the Greeks called kairos. And then there’s the physicist who says time is an illusion to prevent everything happening at once in our experience! I’m going for kairos, and our starting point is right now, this time.
When I told a fundamentalist that we shared something transcendent and precious, he'd have none of it. Of course, I knew why because I was there once. Some confessions of a former fundamentalist. So — what is fundamental? And what is fundamentalism up to?
Ten years ago today our eyes witnessed a horror on a scale, and of a kind, that no human eye ought ever to see, and that no human psyche is quite prepared to handle. The next day, the Guardian newspaper in London (founded by Unitarians, by the way) said: "The temptation right now is to make somebody pay. And pay... and pay... and pay. Take a deep breath, America. Keep cool. And keep control." We didn't stay cool. Reflections on a moment in the stream of time.
The End of All Things is At Hand
That's what a young poet, friend of Emerson, declared one day, interrupting a faculty meeting at Harvard Divinity School, where he taught — at least, until this day! Knowing, as we do, that scientists are increasingly seeing the continuation of life on earth as dubious, the poet's apocalyptic language is disquieting. What are we supposed to do? Is it time to make sandwich signs quoting him and stand on the street corner? And feeling like the folks who are predicting the Second Coming on May 21?
Five years ago, Alzheimer's terrible assault on my Mom came to an end. How could the loveliest of good lives be reduced to this? I don't have an answer, but I do have memories, and some reflections about the pride, and hope, and deep fears of parents; and on change, sometimes anguishing change, while the generations roll on, and with it, our own relationship with this world of life.
A Higher "We" — the farthest reaches of possibility for congregational life
The culture in which we live is the context in which both we ourselves and the world’s future will be created. In a spiritual community — just what kind of culture will we create?
This past Wednesday was Ash Wednesday. Isn't Lent a bit grovelly for UUs? Here's the paradox: We are an amalgam of god and dust. Emerson spoke of the "Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be." And what is that?
What is this energy we celebrate at Valentine's? What is the energy that holds this whole Universe together? We experience it in different ways. Will we allow ourselves its highest influences, and let them propel us forward?
We all know it. But what to do with it? The transformation of anger into a sublime energy we need. Dr. Deacon, Jan. 23, 2011.
Dr. King's odyssey was, actually, an often disheartening path. His wasn't a life of peace. The power — and the penetrating question — of a dream. Dr. Deacon, Jan. 16, 2011.
It’s both Advent and Chanukah, and last month it was the Hindu festival Divali, all with their theme of light, and its persistence in a darkening time. Light is everywhere. What’s it doing? What is it to be light? Dr. Deacon, Dec. 5, 2010.
Dr Deacon tells an engrossing story from our own spiritual tradition of heroism that proves the power, in those moments on which history turns, of Truth. Nov. 21, 2010.
The Edge can be an uncomfortable place to be, but we have been called there, to be Edge-dwellers. Unitarian Universalist spirituality is about edges. Our spiritual forebears have never dwelt quite in “the mainstream” comfortably distant from the Edge. What does it mean to be here? Oct. 24, 2010.
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Jay's sermons at his website: