Unfolding Faith: Sermons from Foothills Unitarian

Every generation has a verdict ready for the one coming up: too soft, too online, too slow to grow up. 

This past Sunday was our cherished annual Service of Remembrance, where we come together to honor loved ones who have passed by bringing photos or mementos into our sacred space. Each one of us is built of many complex layers – that is, many selves across time – and we make one another whole by acknowledging this truth.

We invite you to find a photo or object in remembrance of a loved one who has died to hold or keep close while you listen.

We especially encourage you to find a photo of your loved one at a different stage of life than they were in when they died, if possible, as we honor and celebrate all of the selves they were at different ages. Remembering together is how we let that change make us more tender, braver, and more whole.

If you will attend online, please email a photo of your loved one to [email protected] by 12pm on Saturday, October 24 and we would be honored to print your photo to include on our shared altar.

“Tell me about your day.”

It might be the most ordinary question there is. We ask it at a kitchen table, in the car after school, on a phone call with someone far away. It can also be one of the most loving questions, when we actually wait for the answer.

We begin the series "Days of Our Lives" by getting curious about the real days we’re each living: the 15-year-old’s, the 80-year-old’s, and everyone’s in between. We’ll ask what we miss when we only see who someone is right now, and what changes when we stop assuming we already know each other’s lives.

If your days feel like a lot right now, come join us for community and remember, you don't have to hold them alone.  

So many of us are tired right now. It’s not just a busy kind of tired. It’s tired in the place where our caring lives. We keep showing up for the people and causes we love, and still things seem to be getting worse.

And yet, some people keep going for a lifetime. They grow more alive with each year, deepening their relationships and growing in joy, rather than becoming more depleted. They have hard days like anyone, but something keeps renewing them.

This Sunday we explored what that something is...

Come for rest, for community, and for hope that we practice together.

How do I get through one more day of this? How do I rest without the guilt? How do I hold on until November?

These are the questions of sensible, reasonable, hurting people. They are also impossible to answer. Not because the answers are hidden, but because they may not be the right questions to begin with. "How" keeps us standing exactly where we are until the road is paved, the cost is known, and somebody else has gone first.

This Sunday we ask what "how" is protecting us from: risk, resilience, moral courage, and what question might be waiting underneath it.

What does it mean to be a part of a church where we say - going in - we're going to fall short? Individually, and collectively, we will fail.  Especially as a part of our launch of our new vision!

Failing can feel…humiliating.  Especially when witnessed by others. We often immediately want to blame someone or something else – “something that makes me look or feel foolish couldn’t possibly be MY responsibility, right?”

We want to get things right and effortlessly show how much we know (while, of course, humbly offering help to others).  We want to be good.

But what if spiritual maturity actually springs from getting it wrong instead of getting it right? 

Join Rev. Elaine for a time of exploring the gifts of failure, the uses of humility, and what it means to be human in a world filled with blunders, bewilderment, becoming, and so much beauty.

What becomes possible when Unitarian Universalists "get religion"?

But that hesitancy has a cost. It can keep us from claiming a vision for religion of our own, or contending with what our religion asks of us — personally, and together.

Our new vision statements are built to change that. The first words are the frame for everything that follows: we claim Unitarian Universalism as a religion. A religion with its own claims on us. Its own invitation to promise — and to keep promising — to ourselves, to one another, and to our world.

This Sunday we begin a seven month long examination of our three vision statements with the underlying question: What happens when Unitarian Universalists get religion?

Ask most of us whether we have anything to confess and we'll say "no". Not defensively, just accurately, as far as we can tell. We were right to walk away from religion that called us broken. But we didn't just leave the shame behind. We left behind the practice of reckoning honestly with our lives together, and the kind of room where truth and grace can hold the same person at the same time. For the last Sunday in our Reclaimed series, we take on sin and confession, and ask what it would take to build that room again.

In these hot, dry days of summer, we all know what it feels like to long for water. Literally. Metaphorically.

Last Sunday, that longing found its home in our annual Water Ceremony, as together we explore and practice the next word in our Reclaimed series….Ritual.

Here's your invitation. Find a little water from somewhere that means something to you. A river. A tap. A lake. Bring it with you.

For forty-five years, Unitarian Universalists have gathered this way - pouring what we carry into something we all share. All ages. All stages. One community.

Come with your longing, as we weave together that deeper belonging. 

Let’s begin again.