One of the “touchstone” services we return to year after year – Ancestors Sunday.  It is a multigenerational service, the ceremony of child dedication will be offered, and the choir will be singing. [Remember:  our choir rehearses in the sanctuary on Thursday evenings, starting at 7:15.  If you love music, and want to be a […]

For the last Sunday of the month, September 24th, we will be settled into our two-service, two-RE routine, and will be finishing up our playing with the metaphor/image of the bowl.  Rev. Wik will be preaching, and our choir will once again sing.  [Remember:  our choir rehearses in the sanctuary on Thursday evenings, starting at […]

September 17th will be the first Sunday on which we again have two Sunday services (and two religious education programs for our children and youth).  Worship and Religious Education will begin at 9:15 and 11:15, and Rev. Wik will be preaching.  [Our Social Action Collection will go to support PACEM – People and Congregations Engaged […]

On Sunday, September 10, 2017, the congregation I serve celebrated its annual Balloon Sunday.  We heard the story we called “Grandmother’s Courage,” and my reflections were an exploration of its message.  (Although the story is not included in this post, I think the lessons are clear even without knowing it.) In seminary I was taught […]

I have always loved the story Leia just read.  I first heard it years and years ago, and it touched me then.  All these years later it continues to move me. One of the reasons I so love that story is because I am that pot with a crack in it.  I know only two […]

Preaching: Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr. We fall down and sometimes we are born down. In the history of life’s leaders, life’s transformers is to get up and see beyond the predicament. On the isle of Patmos, left to die, John saw a new heaven, a new earth beyond his predicament. Jefferson saw a way […]

A few weeks back I quietly celebrated one of the high holy days, if you will, of my own, personal liturgical calendar.  August 8 marks the anniversary of an event that took place in 1974 –  a young, French wire walker named Phillipe Petit strung a cable between the north and south towers of the World Trade […]

(I have been asked for a text of the words I spoke this morning. Because I had prepared with handwritten notes, what you find below is a restatement of what I said this morning but might be worded differently. Please forgive lack of punctuation and typos – my computer is in the shop and so […]

August 6:  Give Them Not Hell The 18th century Universalist, John Murray, is remembered as saying, “Go out into the highways and by-ways of America, your new country . . . [and] give them not hell, but hope and courage.”  He may not, in fact, have ever said this, but there is no question that […]

During the summer worship often takes on a more relaxed feel — we have only the one service at 10:00, and it’s a time for different voices in the pulpit.  On the 2nd, Rev. Wik will preach, and on the 9th it will be Rev Alex’s turn.  Sunday the 16th the preacher will be one […]