UUCB Sermons and Personal Theology Lectures: Recent Episodes
UUCB
A Call to the Heart, Mind, and Spirit from the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley
Welcome to the UUCB Sermon and Personal Theology Podcast!
We are sharing our weekly Sunday sermons from our called and visiting ministers, seminarians, and lay people of our congregation, along with the Sunday morning lecture series Personal Theology. Click on the name of the sermon or lecture below to read the text, listen to the podcast or watch the streaming video. You can also subscribe to our podcasts with iTunes® or a link on the Past Services and Personal Theology pages of uucb.org.
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(s) in order for us to locate it.
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.
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.
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.
At 18, they say you're an adult. But you're not really until you're fully into the world of "adulting," that is, doing the things one has to each day, week, month, and year just to live. Our world increasingly disempowers us, making adulthood seem like a series of chores rather than a time of living into the people we should be.
For many, the season of Advent is about waiting—in a period of holy discontent—for something greater than our imaginings to pull the world out of confusion and suffering. Often that power is discerned only by listening through the din of the holidays to the quiet message of hope coming to the world.
Rev. Bret Lortie currently serves as an Air Force chaplain at Travis AFB. He has served two Unitarian Universalist congregations as Senior Minister—in Evanston, Illinois, and San Antonio, Texas—and prior to ministry was a magazine editor for the Chicago Sun Times and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Rev. Lortie is married to Cindy Lortie and in his spare time plays trombone in the Solano Winds.
This week we will hear the story of how two people with different perspectives listened deeply to one another, and how the experience empowered them in different ways. We will celebrate as our Board President changes her name and consider deeply how we are all called to listen and respond when love makes a change or a boundary.
There's an old line that religion isn't just fire insurance -- that is, it's more than just a way to avoid eternal flames in hell. A deep, healthy spiritual foundation can help us be ready for things we could never have seen coming, good and bad. Our community aims to teach skills, foster resilience, and create relationships that strengthen us all.