Gathering for Sunday services in person and online, 10:15 am.
WE RETURN TO TWO SERVICES TODAY (AT 9:30 AND 11 AM)!
“Friend” means so many things, from an acquaintance you allow to read your social media, to the person for whom you’d drop everything and travel a thousand miles if they needed someone. What does it mean to you to have a friend? To be a friend? And what are you doing to tend your friendships? Music: Ruth Huber, piano
“Side with Love.” This rallying cry and campaign has been a marker of Unitarian Universalism for years, ever evolving to respond to the injustices in our world. But what does it *really* mean to side with love? What does it ask of us, as people of faith, to be and do in a world where hate and fear feel abundant? Special Music: Ruth Huber, piano
Our Children’s Religious Education (RE) year draws to a close, but exploration and expansion of our spiritual selves does not pause in summer. It isn’t carried out just in the classroom, either, or just by our RE teachers. Springboarding from some of their wisdom, we’ll discover how each of us not only can be a religious educator but is already. Music: Mary Gospe, vocalist/guitar
As a country that venerates change, youth, progress, and the future, it’s no wonder we are often uncomfortable facing the past–especially the passages that do us little credit. Even as we mark Memorial Day, we praise an attitude of “Never apologize, never explain.” Today we look to a different model for integrating the past into the present: ironically, in a country that has sometimes been the United States’s bitter enemy. Special music: Veronika Agranov-Dafoe, piano
As young people at UUCPA come of age, they spend several months together in reflection on the questions adult UUs grapple with, meet with mentors from the congregation, and articulate their own beliefs in a credo project. They will share their credos and lead the service today. Music: Yuri Liberzon, classical guitar
For our annual Flower Communion, we each bring a flower (or several), fill vases and baskets with them, and after blessing the flowers and each other, choose a flower that someone else brought and bring it home. (There will be plenty of extras for those who didn’t know or forgot–a living example of abundance!) It’s a beauty-filled, joy-filled intergenerational service built around a ritual that has been practiced in Unitarian Universalist churches since the 1920s. Music: Sarah Kirton, Scandinavian music
Two hundred years ago today, William Ellery Channing proudly claimed the pejorative “Unitarian” and gave a 90-minute sermon called “Unitarian Christianity” in which he proclaimed the centrality of reason in religion. To- day’s sermon will be shorter, but Amy will take up a related issue. How can reason and the other elements of religion co-exist? Music: Teresa Oroco. flute; Orlando Castro, guitar
What we honor with a special day or simply a moment of our attention, we elevate in our lives. What needs attention that we neglect too much? (It may or may not be lima beans, celebrated last Saturday by those in the know.) And what do we attend to that we could begin to ignore, the better to pay attention to more important things? Music: Martin Manley, jazz piano
Have you ever felt that you were losing something about yourself – or even that it was being taken away? Those moments are like deaths, and what follows can be like resurrection: something within us being born out of the ashes of what we used to know or what we used to be. In this intergenerational service, we hear the rest of the Easter story as Dan’s Unitarian mother told it to him, and Amy leads us all in using our minds and bodies to remember those transformative moments. We also celebrate several of our community’s newest children today in child dedications. Music: Elizabeth Russ, soprano
Did Jesus know, when he entered Jerusalem to cheers and choruses of “Hosanna!,” that this was a moment of triumph? Did he know it was the beginning of the end of his life? The most important moments often go unrecognized. Instead, we build a life in the dark, by feel, and need hindsight to discover what was most important. Dan tells the Palm Sunday story and Amy preaches. Music: Jessica Martin, guitar