Opening Words This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your […]

Opening Words There’s a famous Hasidic story about the rabbi who disappeared every Shabat Eve ‘to commune with God in the forest,’ or so his congregation thought. Once they assigned a cantor to follow the rabbi on his Shabat Eve trip into the forest to observe his holy encounter. Deeper and deeper into the forest […]

The title for this sermon comes from a book of essays by twenty two writers who tell us about their experience with depression. We sang the old African American spiritual to set the stage for this sermon on depression. Each of the writers in Unholy Ghost could have said, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,” […]

The central symbol of Christianity is the cross- a means of torture and execution used by the Romans to terrorize the Jewish population. Christians turned it into a symbol of hope for millions of people who see deeper meanings in the symbol. My grandmother used to say, “Everyone has a cross to bear.” It helped […]

Emerson said, “If I know your party I anticipate your argument.” When I see another Jesus book I generally avoid it. But the title of a Jesus book by Bruce Chilton, Rabbi Jesus, caught my eye last spring, so I read the review in the Times- you can’t judge a book by its title- and […]

Opening Words: Morning Poem, by Mary Oliver Every morning the world is created. Under the orange sticks of the sun the heaped ashes of the night turn into leaves again and fasten themselves to the high branches–and ponds appear like black cloth on which are painted islands of summer lilies. If it is in your […]

This is the last word from this pulpit for this difficult year, which ends tomorrow. It’s a big responsibility- having the last word at the end of this particular year. Maybe you should have the last word? I got thinking about the idea of ‘the last word.’ For example, King Henry VIII had the last […]

“Consider a man riding a bicycle. Whoever he is, we can say three things about him. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. Most important of all, we know that if at any point between the beginning and the […]

Opening Words In his wonderful, sensitive little poem, The Pasture, Robert Frost offers a call to worship…an invitation to go into the deeper places of the mind and heart to clear away the accumulated debris; an invitation to go down into the depths of the soul and understand more clearly the source of love and […]

First, let’s look again at the words to the old Shaker hymn. In Shaker worship there were no written prayers, no liturgy-it was characterized by spontaneity. Everything about the Shakers was distinctively simple, unornamented, functional. Shaker furniture is known for its finely crafted style of simplicity. Shakers took a vow of celibacy-a simple answer to […]