Gathering for Sunday services in person and online at 10:30 am.
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A conflict avoider’s guide to one of the most challenging aspects of community. It turns out that dealing with conflict bravely is less scary than avoiding it. The Posadas, a story of this season, will help us. Music: Gwen Halterman, harp
This is an intergenerational service.
Today’s entire offering collection will be donated to Ada’s Cafe.
James Luther Adams asserted that while immediate optimism was unrealistic, “the resources (divine and human) that are available for the achievement of meaningful change justify an attitude of ultimate optimism.” We’ll take a close look at that claim in this final service on Adams’s tenets of religious liberalism. World AIDS Day is, strangely enough, an apt day for such an exploration. Music: Veronika Agranov Dafoe, piano
We like to tell the story that Thanksgiving began in the fall of 1621. But actually Thanksgiving has been reinvented many times, sometimes including new people, sometimes leaving people out. We’ll imagine how Thanksgiving looked from the point of different people over the centuries. Today is an intergenerational service.
Music: Sara Kirton, violin
James Luther Adams, whose “Five Smooth Stones” of liberal religion we’ve been exploring, was a great believer in institutions. This is perhaps the greatest challenge to people in our spiritual communities, especially since the iconoclasm of the 60s and the profound (and warranted) mistrust in civic and religious institutions that has marked our age. If Adams was right that we need institutions in order to enact goodness on a grand scale, then how are we to create institutions that we can trust? Music: Brocelïande
In this jazz-influenced service, Martin Manley will illustrate for us how music informs and inspires his spiritual life. He will discuss whether music can ever really be considered to be divinely inspired and touch on the paradox that many transcendent musicians are actually deeply flawed human beings. Music: Martin Manley
When loss befalls us, we may wish to float above brutal reality. Our loving community helps us to endure coming back to earth. Today is our annual remembrance service–please bring photos and other mementos for our altar. Special Music: Veronika Agranov Dafoe, piano
Our guest speaker is now retired and living on the Peninsula after a career that has included service to our congregations in England, New Hampshire, and California, and seven years as the District Minister for the London area.
Special Music: Ema Currier, Andrew Currier, piano and bass violin
“A faith that is not the sister of justice is bound to bring us to grief,” James Luther Adams wrote. Religion isn’t primarily about what we believe, but about what we do: specifically, what we do to bring about the world we long for. Special Music: Season of Us
Appropriately, we will be giving the Peg Capron Social Justice Award to Jane Glauz this morning.
Robert Frost’s famous poem is often interpreted as an exhortation to take “the road less travelled.” But a second look at the poem reveals a more complex lesson about how we deal with regret, how we tell our own stories, and what we might do the next time we face a fork in the road. It’s an appropriate guide for the time of self-examination marked by Judaism’s High Holidays. Special Music: Veronika Agranov Dafoe, piano
Today’s entire offering collection will be donated to South Bay Sanctuary Covenant.
This service contemplates the notion of leadership. What makes a good leader? A good follower? How much does being a good leader resemble being a good parent? Hint: good leaders lead you towards things rather than away from things . . . Special Music: Karen Van Dyke, flute