Stories for all Ages all include a visual graphic. Sermons do not have a visual graphic in their post.
In the Christian story, this man who embodied faith and love had such an enormous capacity for hope that not even through torture, not even through death, could this be deterred. Even after death hope was resurrected – transcending life, transcending this mortal world. As he rose from the dead and ascended to heaven so too was hope reborn, so too did promise rise.
They were a suffering people, and they were a determined people. They were a people in bondage, and they were a people of faith. The Israelites lived a life of enslavement to the Egyptians, and yet what we celebrate today is their journey towards freedom. We celebrate their commitment to that which was much bigger than their individual selves – their God and their community and their faith. Their commitment to a better life. We celebrate their exodus – the flight of the Hebrew slaves, a people who freed themselves from bondage and created a nation.
I wonder about those pieces of identity that can’t be a part of a physical mosaic but that nonetheless work to create who we are as a faith – a wealth of religious backgrounds or no religious background, a tapestry of theologies, a patchwork of needs, desires, and expectations, a vibrant bouquet of races, ethnicities, socioeconomic backgrounds, physical abilities, state of mental well-being, addicted or sober – here and held firmly together by covenant – by that hardy, dependable, stable grout. In this way, when we commit to our faith, when we commit to this church, we commit to the interconnectedness of it all.
By Rev. Jane Smith at Channing Memorial Church “I think of these mighty trees as our faith – our roots symbolizing our unique Unitarian and Universalist histories and theologies, providing the strong foundation from which our Seven Principles – as a mighty trunk – can grow, and further give way to those branches that are our unique congregations, filled with the beauty…
By the Rev. Jane Smith at Channing Memorial Church, Ellicott City, Md. “We all need practices of self-care if we are to fully engage with ourselves and the world around us. We are living in difficult times. Without time to center and be, our minds and our beings can be overrun by the needs, anxieties, and rush of the day. If we…