In this podcast episode of our December 3, 2017, service, Harmony UU member Alexx Cook explores the idea of resilience, how it affects us, and ways we can change our mindset to become more resilient in tough situations.

Read more details about this sermon here:

https://harmonyuu.org/the-sermons/resilience-respond-adversity-determines-success/

In this podcast episode of our October 15, 2017, service, guest speaker Barbara Condo shares how One Way Farm Children’s Home helps kids who have been abused, abandoned, troubled, neglected, or victims of human trafficking.

Read more details about this sermon here:

https://harmonyuu.org/the-sermons/one-way-farm/

If you’ve ever wondered about transgender parenting or how to love and support our transgender youth, this episode of the Harmony UU Podcast is for you. Listen in as a local mom shares moments and realizations from her personal parenting journey. For our guest speaker Lisa Phair (as for many of us), the process of loving like a mother has been developmental—a process that allows so very much to fall away that does not matter or no longer applies.

This mother’s love is pure. It is strong. It is brave. And while it started personally, it may be needed more than ever, politically. This mother’s love is not just for mothers!

The sermon featured in this episode, “This Mother’s Love: More Than the Sum of Its Parts,” was recorded at Harmony, a Unitarian Universalist Community, on April 2, 2017. 

This sermon, “Empathy: Too Little, or Too Much?,” was originally delivered to the congregation of Harmony, a Unitarian Universalist Community, on March 5, 2017. It is published here with permission from the writer, with all rights reserved.

By Paul Smith

We often think of our capacity to experience the suffering of others as the ultimate source of goodness. Many of our wisest policy-makers, activists, scientists, and philosophers agree that the only problem with empathy is that we don’t have enough of it.

But new research makes the case that some of the worst decisions made by individuals and nations—who to give money to, when to go to war, how to respond to climate change, and who to imprison—are too often motivated by honest, yet misplaced, emotions, and specifically empathy.

This sermon, “Our Muslim Neighbors,” was originally delivered to the congregation of Harmony, a Unitarian Universalist Community, on February 19, 2017. It is published here with permission from the writer, with all rights reserved.

By Shaykh Aiyub Muhammad Hansbhai

For this brief introduction to Islam and Muslims, let’s begin with a few definitions. Islam can be defined as “peace through submission to God.” Muslim refers to “one who submits to God.” And the Arabic word Salaam simply means “peace.”

We believe that when everyone follow the laws of our creator willingly, then there is peace for self and everyone.

This sermon, “Belief, Knowledge, and Truth,” was originally delivered to the congregation of Harmony, a Unitarian Universalist Community, on February 5, 2017. It is published here with permission from the writer, with all rights reserved.

By Mike Markey

This talk is about epistemology, which is the study of how we know things. Better put, it is “the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.”

So the idea for this sermon came about from group discussions here after other sermons. I had made the comment that “knowledge is a subset of belief,” and was asked to explain that in more depth. This is my answer to that request, and some thoughts on epistemology in general.

This sermon, “Food and Our World, was originally delivered to the congregation of Harmony, a Unitarian Universalist Community, on January 15, 2017. It is published here with permission from the writers, with all rights reserved.

By Rob Rogan with Karen Gotschall

I have spent the better part of my adult life working in the food industry. I have seen about every step between farm and grocery store and want to take a few minutes to talk about the issues as it relates to all of us here. But I will make the disclaimer that I am speaking for me today and nothing I say represents any statement from the company I work for.

However, working for a large food company will obviously provide a certain view of the food supply chain. Like it or not, large companies have a bad reputation in our modern world and for the most parts consumers want a local personal connection with their products. That said, large companies still handle the bulk of the food we consume in this society so what they do still has enormous implications on the food in our world.

I will cover a couple topics today, but the one I want to spend the greatest amount of time on is waste.

Reducing food waste

We have heard a lot of talk about the need for food in this world, so let’s talk lay it out there to start. Depending on which study you want to believe somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of all food grown in the world ends up thrown away as waste. Yet more than 10 percent of the population is malnourished.

Just think about that for a second.

What this means is that we live in a world with about 7.5 billion people. We produce enough food to feed about 12 billion people. Yet we only manage to effectively feed about 6.8 billion people.

That is surely oversimplifying a complex issue, but just think about that for a moment.

This food waste has points all along the supply chain, including many places you can’t control, but in America you have the greatest opportunity to reduce waste. If you look at the graph here you see many points of waste along the way from farm to table, but the greatest responsibility lies with us, the end user or consumer at the bottom of the graph. The production loss from fruits and vegetables is the other outlier at the top, but we will talk about that in a bit.

Now this isn’t as true in many developing countries, where inadequate supply chains, lack of refrigeration, and poor storage solution end up with much higher losses up in the food chain—but this isn’t the case here.

Furthermore, I would submit that what this graph is calling “waste” in areas such as processing are actually much better to tolerate because almost everything that is waste in the food industry usually goes to two streams: “Certa” or “Offal.” Certa and offal are industry names for taking either dry or wet waste and sending it out to be feed for farm animals. The amount of food that is actually put to a landfill from many food manufacturing sites is very tiny,

The food industry faces challenges to find solutions to complex issues. Are you aware of how much milk it takes to make a single serving Greek yogurt? Are you aware that to make the Greek yogurt everyone loves they have to strain the protein out of milk and for every gallon of Greek yogurt, about 3 gallons of waste liquid are made. But General Mills and Chiobani still recycle that waste onto crops or into a bio generator to make electricity.

What we can do to help

As consumers, we don’t have this built in secondary stream to farm animals and our waste tends to end up going to landfill. So what can we do about it?

* Buy what you need: A few years ago our family joined a CSA, a community supported agriculture, so that we could “buy local” and get our produce from a local farmer. Anyone else do this? We were feeling pretty good about ourselves when we signed up.

This sermon was originally delivered to the congregation of Harmony, a Unitarian Universalist Community, on January 1, 2017. It is published here with permission from the writer, with all rights reserved.

By Susan Wenner Jackson

When I was a little girl, I loved Mr. Rogers. I’m sure many of you remember his long-running series, “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” which aired on PBS from 1968 until 2001. I have such fond early childhood memories of Trolley, jing-a-linging his way to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, populated with slightly bizarre puppet people like King Friday, Prince Tuesday, Daniel Tiger, and Lady Elaine Fairchilde.

Perhaps the main thing that drew me to Mr. Rogers was his gentle kindness with each person he encountered, and his slow, deliberate way of going about everyday activities, such as putting on his shoes or hanging up his sweater. I guess he reminded me of my own dad, who talks quietly and takes his time. But Mr. Rogers also had this mesmerizing quality of total, loving acceptance. I mean, at the end of each episode, he looked right at me, and said to me, with total sincerity:

“You’ve made this day a special day just by being you. You are the only person like you in this whole world. And people can like you just because you’re you.”

I wasn’t the only one who felt this way…

 

Invoking the spirit of Mr. Rogers

In the aftermath of the presidential election, with all its vitriol, divisiveness, open hostility, and pervasive, intense fear, I had that wind-knocked-out-of-me feeling. Followed by the daze you often experience after a major shock, like “Is this really happening?” In order to emerge from that daze, and to move forward in hope rather than fall back into a mire of despair, I had to find something solid to hold onto.

Who should come to mind, but Mr. Rogers?

His words were circulated quite a bit after 9/11, and after other deadly disasters that happened since:

“For me, as for all children, the world could have come to seem a scary place to live. But I felt secure with my parents, and they let me know that we were safely together whenever I showed concern about accounts of alarming events in the world.

“There was something else my mother did that I’ve always remembered: ‘Always look for the helpers,’ she’d tell me. ‘There’s always someone who is trying to help.’ I did, and I came to see that the world is full of doctors and nurses, police and firemen, volunteers, neighbors and friends who are ready to jump in to help when things go wrong.”

I decided to grab onto Mr. Rogers’ notions as a way of pulling myself out of the dark, swirling, scary place.

The concept of “neighbor” across faiths

As a kid, I had no idea Mr. Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister. Turns out, his TV show was his ministry. Pretty sneaky, right? But also, pretty effective in spreading the core message of Christianity to the masses.

From a 2015 article in the Atlantic:

“Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” helped young viewers process stress incurred during intense periods of cultural upheaval. When it would have been easy to demonize villains, Rogers instead forced viewers to tussle with a question Jesus himself was asked in the gospel of Luke: “Who is my neighbor?”

Mr. Rogers’ answer: “The underlying message of the Neighborhood is that if somebody cares about you, it’s possible that you’ll care about others. ‘You are special, and so is your neighbor’—that part is essential: that you’re not the only special person in the world. The person you happen to be with at the moment is loved, too.”

Guess what? This whole “love thy neighbor” thing isn’t just a Christian idea. It’s also woven into the seven principles of Unitarian Universalism. See also: Judaism, Islam, Hinduism … well, you see the pattern here. A higher calling to get to know and care for our neighbors can be found...