UUCB Sermons: Recent Episodes
UUCB
Welcome to the UUCB Sermon Podcast. We are sharing our weekly Sunday sermons from our called and visiting ministers, seminarians, and lay people of our congregation. Click on the name of the sermon below to read the text or listen to the podcast. Y If you are searching for a sermon and don't find it here, please contact us. Our archives date back to 2007. You will need the date and or/name of the sermon in order for us to locate it.
Join us this week as we celebrate Black History Month through story, song, preaching, and personal testimony. This is a service for all ages, and childcare is available in the Nursery for babies and young children.
It takes discipline and courage to admit that you don't know something or aren't the right person to tackle a particular challenge. Being an effective presence for change in our world can also mean learning when to be quiet and listen and when to support others' work.
Unitarian Universalists have a long tradition of advocacy, public engagement, and refusing to be quiet in the face of injustice. Learn more about how w e can be a voice for compassion, mercy, and justice in our world right now.
As the impact of the climate crisis continues to grow, it is tempting to look away, focusing our energy instead on problems that feel small enough to solve. This week in worship, we will consider how our liberal religious values are calling us to engage the impending catastrophe courageously. Show up this Sunday and commit yourself to showing up for our planet.
The famous labor slogan calling for a fair workday should still ring in our ears today: Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will. We will explore what we are called to do in those precious moments: relax, spend time with our loved ones, change the world, all of the above?
So much of our lives are spent working and sleeping, so how we spend our time apart from work and home is important both for our well-being and to the fabric of our wider communities. On this day when many of our members will be representing our church at Albany and Berkeley's Solano Stroll, we will reflect on our role and impact as a "third place" in the lives of our members, friends, and beyond.
In the United States we have spent lifetimes destroying our sense of connection. Disconnected from everyone, we are awash in a sea of poor substitutes for feeling alive. How can we honor the lessons and legacy of organizing, of connection, of knowing that what we cannot do alone, we can do together?
Something about lighting a fire signifies: "now we choose actions with serious intent." Our lighting a UU chalice is one of many types of fire ritual. Fire can symbolize creation and destruction, comfort and cruelty, the eternal and the ephemeral, the power of intense emotion and the illusory nature of all experience, the brightness of Heaven and the torments of Hell. How can a single phenomenon represent so many concepts? What makes fire such a versatile engine of ritual?
BIOGRAPHY: Jim Gasperini is currently writing a cultural history of fire entitled Fire in the Mind. A longtime member of UUCB, he has served as Worship Associate, Chalice Circle Facilitator, and Webmaster. He has authored educational computer games, books for children about history, and interactive multimedia works of art. A longtime “burner” (participant the Burning Man festival), he was a member of the High Council of the Burning Man Opera. UUCB Worship Service texts 8-11-19