|
|
|
|
YOM KIPPUR – Probably the most important of Judaism's high holy days, the culmination of the Days of Awe , that begins with Rosh Hashanah. It was established in Leviticus 23:26-32. "Yom Kippur" means "Day of Atonement." It is a day set aside to "afflict the soul," to atone for the sins of the past year. Themes of our service include repentance, reconciliation, asking for forgiveness. "Atonement" can be broken down into: "At-one-ment", implying that when we forgive and are forgiven, we are brought back into relationship with one another.
Dates of Yom Kippur are:
Examples of Readings, Poems, music, and prayers to celebrate life. Links to additional readings.
Child Dedication and Naming Service:
Our children will live in the world we leave them. They will live with the problems we have not yet handled. We can't tell them how to live in that future. But they are learning from us right now. What values, what passwords do we as a religious community need to transmit to them that will give them the tools they will need?
How We Welcome Our Children
An explanation of the the ANCIENT RITES and rituals of passage and their history that are used today by
UU's and interfaith, intercultural couples to welcome and give thanks for our children. CEREMONIES OF HOPE and
Child dedications
'National Coming Out Day' – Sunday closest to October 11.National Coming Out Day (NCOD) is an internationally observed civil awareness day for coming out and discussion about gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender people (LGBT), and asexuals. It is observed by members of the LGBT communities and their supporters (often referred to as "allies") on October 11 every year. NCOD was founded in 1988 by Robert Eichberg, a psychologist from New Mexico and Jean O'Leary, an openly-gay political leader from Los Angeles, on behalf of the personal growth workshop The Experience and National Gay Rights Advocates.The date of October 11 was chosen because it was the anniversary of the 1987 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. Gay Pride or This is the Sermon that tells his own story by Rev. Sean Parker Dennison show that we are always Standing on the Side of Love
November 11, 2011
Thanksgiving:
"What is religion?"
The Way With No God: Atheism As A Religious Path.
Being Religious in the Twenty first Century
NEW YEAR'S DAY—Sunday closest to January 1. An opportunity to celebrate the beginning of a new year, review our priorities. Themes
can include reflection upon the year that has just passed; hope for the promise of the year to come; resolutions to change; review of our carbon footprint;
the passage of time; hope; expectation; dreaming of a creating a better tomorrow.
On Love a service for St Valentine's Day
Is Nature Your Spiritual Home A Celebration
of the Spring Equinox
World
Environment Day :
Bisexual. gay. lesbian and transgender people:Find a welcoming place with Unitarian Universalist Congregations: We support Freedom to Marry and Marriage rights for all.
Hiroshima:
Sharing the Water of Life: A Water Communion
October 4, Feast of St. Francis of Assisi ,
A Holiday Service When is Enough, Enough ?
Spiritual Celebration for Christmas: Big Rocks: Setting Our Priorities A Religious examination of our values and our priorities.
On Love A celebration of St Valentine's Day and allday filled with love.
Summer Solstice
Random thoughts on Joy
a sample of sermons from congregations by other ministers
Take your thoughts about time and priorities and that 4th dimension of existence and examine them. Here is
Guide to Importance of November 11, 2011. Time and Priorities. How should we interpret this. Armistice Day (also known as
Remembrance Day) is on 11 November and commemorates the armistice signed between the Allies of World War I
and Germany. Later it was changed to Veteran's Day an annual United States holiday honoring all military veterans.
At eleven minutes and 11 seconds after 11am on the 11th of November this year, the time and date will be 11:11:
11:11:11 11 and 11 11 11 11 11 11 11:11:11 11/11/11 . Could this be a new beginning?
Gratitude as a Spiritual Practice. Do you think There is a calmness to a life lived in Gratitude, a quiet joy?
In the hurried pace of our lives today do you know people who have achieved or are trying to achieve calmness
and quiet joy? How have they changed their priorites and the life choices they make? – Sunday before
Thanksgiving. Themes can include gratitude for loved ones, gathering the family together, breaking bread together,
Native American perspective on the holiday, Puritans, remembering those less fortunate and immigration.
Some congregations celebrate bread communion at this service. This ritual
can include the breaking and passing around of bread throughout the congregation. Congregants eat the bread, or feed it to one another, while being led in a reflection about gratitude, sharing and being together in community.
Today we will consider and discuss, "What is religion?" This is one of the Great Questions of Life.
"God" is only a name we give to one way of trying to describe the experience that comes when we are, to describe it simply, ''mysteriously filled; when we get past our distractions, illusions and pride, to the reality upon which existence itself is founded. Reality is a gracious gift; the eternal surprise that there is anything instead of nothing, and that the anything includes us and our awareness.
How do we define religion? Can there possibly be some form of spiritual religion consistent with today's non-supernatural understanding of reality?
When is Enough Enough The Gift of Change for Christmas holidays Advent and why we prepare, importance of this time of year. Pre Christmas Advent Service and discussion of gifts and how much more we want or
need.This is a holiday time of year when we ask—and are asked—what do you want? We ask and we answer. We shop, we
wrap, we ship. And the season usually comes and goes so quickly that we never really answer the question: What do you
want? This can be a question for each of us to hold on to for a time in mind and heart. What do we want? Not what would we
like, but what do we want to give us a deeper connection with life and to help us give expression to our deepest selves?
Not a long list of things, but a sense of clarity that illuminates what it is we are doing and why.
Welcome the Return of the Light. If it seems that the holidays are more synonymous with stress than with celebration
we invite you to pause amidst busy holiday preparations and purchases to contemplate the most basic of our needs and
wants—warmth and light in a simple ritual with your beloved community.
Some congregations celebrate the Fire Communion Ceremony
at this service. In this service, congregants burn pieces of paper containing brief descriptions of something they most wish
to leave behind and light a candle for a new hope for the coming year.
Forty years after his last and most radical address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the question on which Martin Luther King Jr. centered his talk was "Where do we go from here? " This subject continues to haunt anyone troubled by the progress of racial justice in this country. And so we raise it again today.
Living our Seventh Principle. The first Earth Day was on the April 22, 1970. It continues to be
the International Earth Day. In many countries Earth Day this year is Sunday April 22, 2012. And
World Environment Day in June
First Sunday in June. Like Earth Day this is yet another opportunity to live our Seventh Principle.
To reevaluate our lives and plan how to Reduce our Ecological Footprint. Going Green should become a spiritual practice.
Take Your Time
Today we will meditate on a simple statement and examine what great thinkers over the centuries have thought about time,
the fourth dimension. At five minutes and six seconds after 4am on the 8th of July this year, the time and date will be
04:05:06 07/08/09. What do we think about our Priorities
We Will Not Repeat This Evil An interfaith Worship service to discuss what can we, as individuals and as a covenanted community, do to plan for the achievement and maintenance of a nuclear-weapon-free world. Remember those killed in the bombings of Hiroshima & Nagasaki and those affected by its aftermath. All who were injured or killed in conflicts like young Sadako, all who are now in harms way, including soldiers on all sides of the many conflicts that our small blue planet is now enduring and especially the innocent civilians affected by these wars, all killed, injured or grieving because of acts of terrorism.
The Flower communion service was created by Norbert Capek (1870- 1942), who founded the Unitarian Church in Czechoslovakia. He introduced this special service to that church on June 4, 1923. The service was brought to the United States in 1940 and introduced to the members of First Parish in Cambridge, Massachusetts by Dr. Capek's wife, Maja V. Capek. This has history ritual, readings and hymns.
Our traditional Father's Day Service where you are invited to bring a photograph or some object that represents your father to share with our small congregation. Fathers and Grandfathers may also share stories of fatherhood.
The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual
inspiration that comes to us when we discovers that someone else believes in us and is willing to trust us. "To Make a Friend,
you must be a Friend" What is Friendship ?
A Celebration for Labor Day People often ask "What do you do?" What if the focus was not "what you do", but "how it is done"? What would change for you?
All life comes from water. Life started in the ocean, where it began to take its many and amazing forms. Babies are cradled in water before they are born. Everything that lives needs water, from the smallest plants to the largest whale. From the beginning of history, humans have built their homes and their lives around water. Today we celebrate water, which connects and nourishes all life. The beginning of the church year for our congregations is called homecoming. Some congregations include the Water Communion ritual in this service. This ritual involves members and friends who have brought small amounts of water to the service, taken from special places they have been over the summer. The water might be collected from a rainstorm or is significant or symbolic in some way. They can pour the water into a large bowl and tell the congregation where it is from and the meaning it has for them. Other congregations bring into the sanctuary items of significance to their own history. The chalice, a banner or wall hanging, the covenant, hymnal, a Religious Education Book, or crayons, even a coffee urn. What ever symbolizes the regathering of the community.
World Day for Animals, bless pets, bring photographs of pets, even stuffed animals, blessing animals out of doors. In our list of moral principles we respect the interdepent web of all life,cherish our mother earth. We meet together to pray for Animals
A calendar of commonly celebrated occasions in Unitarian Universalist congregations. There are congregations that may not celebrate many of these events. There are also occasions that are important to some congregations but which are not listed here.
In the busy holiday season, let us remember the true gifts of the spirit. Let us feel the blessing of community and the sweet expectation of good things to come. And now we extinguish our chalice but not the light of hope: hope for change that brings new blessings into our lives and the lives of those around us.
A religion of realities is a faith that the real world provides sufficient beauty, adventure, and growth for our needs and aspirations. We are real creatures in a real world; only if we miss the splendor of this world do we need fantastic substitutes.
Trust is like any intensive agricultural crop. It must be carefully sown on fertile soil, fiercely defended against the vagaries of climate and pests, and appropriately harvested, making sure to separate the chaff from the grain, keeping the grain and burning the chaff. It does not do to throw a seed behind our backs as if it were a pinch of salt, and embrace the wishful thought that luck will favor us.
Our Principles:
The 2nd and 6th principles
Principle 2: Justice, equity and compassion in human relation
p>Principle 6: The Goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all
The 3rd and 5th principles
Principle 3: Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations
Principle 5: The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large
The Fourth Principle:
A free and responsible search for truth and meaning. How Unitarian Universalism is a spiritual path
Index of Sermons
The United Nations: Forgotten Successes and Remembered Failures Realizing Our Global Conscience
Twelve Steps How involvement with a 12 Step program can awakened a new spirituality.
Why we Unitarian Universalists are not Catholics
The End of Faith Faith is being used to justify and motivate horrific violence.
OUR GLOBAL CONSCIENCE
Protecting Human Rights to Life, Liberty and Security. How to use The Millennium Development Goals in Social Justice and Witnessing For the Beloved Community.
