Unitarian Universalist Church of Delaware County - Sermons

During the holidays, it is customary for families getting together to “say grace” before meals in order to ask for blessings for the future. But is grace only present when things are going well? Is there grace present in struggle? Join Matthew Pargeter-Villarreal as he explores our relationship with grace and just what it means when we talk about it.

There is no text for this service, so please enjoy the video!

“Find a stillness?” Are you kidding me? If you’re a parent of school-age children, this probably sounds like some kind of cruel joke. With hybrid or all-virtual classes since last March, with kids unable to visit friends and everyone trapped under one roof for months on end, stillness is as rare as, dare I say it, an Eagles Super Bowl. I can personally vouch for that, as Irene and I had our 6 year-old first grader with us for a week after Thanksgiving, and we sat through five hours of Zoom classes with him every day. Between schoolwork and then the release of pent-up energy that followed, stillness was in short supply. My hat is off to everyone who has been in this position for months on end – as well as to the teachers who are doing their best to control and educate squirmy, restless children remotely. Kudos to all of you that you are still standing.

And the words of that hymn, “Find a stillness,” have a very different but equally cruel meaning for those who are alone. Isolated in houses, apartments, nursing homes and progressive care facilities.  All they have is stillness. A constant, persistent, oppressive stillness that is devoid of social contact, each day like the day before, stretching on with no end in sight. The puzzles have all long-ago been pieced together, the photographs all organized into albums, the books on the shelf alphabetized or simply sorted by color. Stillness is imposed like a prison sentence.

At this time of year, stillness – in the form of darkness – is imposed on all of us celestially. The tilt of the earth on its axis gives us no choice in the matter. We are in the shortest days – and hence the longest nights – of the year, and it’s no coincidence that so many of our holidays – Christmas, Hannukah, Diwali – seek to beat back the darkness with festivals of light. There is, too, the larger stillness that the pandemic has imposed on us all. The “Great Pause,” some are calling it. A time when all our lives are in a kind of suspended animation as we wait for the vaccine, as we wait for the time when we can walk down the street and shake hands or hug. The time when we can safely return to our sanctuaries on Sundays and sing our hearts out. It’s been nine months – nearly to the day – since we canceled our first in-person worship service and went to this live, virtual format.

There are so many ways in which, this year in particular, stillness has been imposed on and enforced against us. So it’s challenging to talk today about finding stillness, choosing stillness, letting stillness carry us. But as people of faith, it’s a challenge worth engaging. And when I consider what it takes to find stillness, to choose stillness, to let stillness carry us, I find myself drawn back to the beautiful and powerful reframing of being locked in the darkness that Sikh activist and lawyer Valerie Kaur introduced us to nearly four years ago. “What if,” she asked, “this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?” Ms. Kaur was referring to the darkness of racial division and the rise of white supremacy in the wake of the 2016 election, but I find it no less useful a metaphor when talking about the times we’re in today, in the midst of a violent, soul-crushing resurgence of Covid-19. What if this darkness, this stillness, this pandemic-imposed pause, is not the darkness, the stillness, the pause of the tomb, but of the womb?

What’s the difference, you might ask? Either way we’re biding our time. We’re stuck where we are. I see a world of difference between the darkness of the tomb and the darkness of the womb. If we are locked in a tomb, or in a prison cell, we are prevented from escaping. We are isolated from all the things we know and love, unable to access light, beauty, pleasure, connection with the outside world. A sentence has been imposed upon us and we are required to serve it. We watch our countdown clock and we sit around waiting for the time to run out. We yearn to return

Our annual Christmas pageant is virtual this year!  What lessons does the Christmas story bring to us in these challenging times?

There is no text for the service so please watch and enjoy the “Christmas Pageant” video!

This Sunday we embarked on our exploration of the power of “imagination”, our month-long Soul Matters theme, exploring the power of words – spoken and written – to create worlds. We’ll also engaged in a participatory, multigenerational online activity to imagine what our world might be, creating a Word Cloud, showing our most common thought; shown below.

There is no text for this service so please enjoy the video!

The Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Augusta, Maine, the congregation where Rev. Peter served as an intern for two years before coming to UUCDC. Rev. Carie Johnson led our service. This Sunday she explores tensions of belonging and becoming in Unitarian Universalism.

There is no text for this sermon, so please enjoy the video!

There’s a game I like to play with my grandsons. We call it “Which superpower?” It’s simple and fun and maybe you’ve played it before. In fact, we can play it right now in the chat. It just requires you to answer two questions: “If you could have any superpower, which superpower would it be, and why?” I’ll wait a little bit if you want to share your answer in the chat.

My answer, which won’t surprise some of you, would be the power to fly. I love being up in the air, whether in a plane or a paraglider, and I love the vast view you get from above. I’d love to have the power to lift off the ground an soar above the trees. To fly anywhere I want. Now, what’s interesting is that, for my grandsons, they always come down to the same answer: they want to have the superpower to be invisible. And when I ask them why, they say things like “that way I can sneak cookies out of the cabinet,” and “then I could spy on people,” and “because then I could play tricks on my parents.” Invisibility gives them the power of sneakiness and surprise, which they think would be great fun.

I don’t tend to psychoanalyze this answer because, after all, it’s just a fun game to play and they’re little kids. But when I think about this answer – that they’d love to be invisible – it says to me that they feel like their parents, their teachers, other adults are keeping a close eye on them, and that maybe they’d like just a little more freedom than they have. But it also tells me that  they know that they are seen, that they are cared for, that they are loved. When we are seen by another person – as children or as adults – we know that we are important, that we matter. Yes, the superpower of invisibility can be fun for a while, but I don’t know anyone who would want to actually be invisible all the time. In fact, a couple years ago I was watching a program on Netflix called “Magic for Humans,” and in one episode the magician, with the help of the audience, convinced a guy that he was actually invisible. (Click here, so you can watch for yourself.) And while he seemed to be having fun at first, the “invisible man” soon started to panic. Not being seen caused him all sorts of stress and anxiety, and it was clear he wanted to go back to being seen. 

Being invisible might be fun if it’s temporary and if we choose it for ourselves. But we all know how awful it feels to be overlooked, passed over, taken for granted. To be invisible. It’s not much fun at all. In fact, it’s downright hurtful. And it’s way more consequential than just a game, especially when we’re talking about being invisible because of the color of our skin, limitations on our abilities, and our economic status. As we heard in today’s reading, “…it should be heartbreaking to us all that people who need our saving message, who are sure that our values could help transform their lives, are trying to be part of us and yet cannot exist within our communities because we lack basic skills in welcoming the personhood and gifts of all people.”[1]

Now, I know that now seems to be a strange time to be talking about hospitality. We’re isolated and socially distanced. We’re doing “virtual” church with Zoom breakout rooms as a substitute for coffee hour in Fellowship Hall. How can we properly greet newcomers – and especially people who don’t look or move or act like the majority of us – when we can’t meet them at our door and usher them upstairs to our Sanctuary? My answer to these questions is this: Now – right now – it’s even more critical that we extend our hospitality to those who find their way to our virtual door. Now is the time when people are craving connection as they never have before. Now is the time when aching souls are seeking comfort and refuge from the storms of their lives. Now is the time when our saving message of love, compassion, equity and justice is most needed, as this pandemic threatens to rip apart the very fabric of our families, our friends, our entire society. Th

As I walked down the hospital hallway, I was expecting to find my good friend JP hooked up to an assortment of wires and tubes, semi-conscious at best. After all, it was just two days after his heart transplant surgery. I was shocked – pleasantly so – when I walked into his room and found him sitting up, alert and talking. Pardon the pun, but it was almost like he hadn’t skipped a beat. Yes, he was hooked up to an IV and a chest tube, but he looked more like he’d had his appendix out than having a new heart installed. We chatted for a while about how the surgery had gone and what the recovery process looked like. And then he told me that he’d set a goal for himself: “I want to run a half-marathon before the first anniversary of my surgery.” Now, back before his heart started to give out, JP had been a soccer player and a distance runner. He had a few full marathons under his belt and more than a dozen half’s. But seeing him sitting in his hospital bed 48 hours after getting a new heart, talking about running 13.1 miles sounded ludicrous. Then he asked me a question, and I’ll never forget this moment. He asked a question far more ludicrous than the idea of him running a Half with his new heart. His question was this: “Do you want to join me?”

Now, let me explain something. I was not a runner. I never had been. Oh, over the years I’d tried to get into it. Probably 5 or 6 times over the course of my adult life I’d invested in a pair of good running shoes. And I’d vow to get to the point where I could feel that legendary “runner’s high” that everyone talks about. But usually within a matter of a few weeks or, in some cases, just a few days, the pain and pure boredom of it just got to me, and I’d give up. Now, it happened that JP had caught me during one of those times where I was dipping my toes into the running world. I was using an app called “Couch to 5k” that’s aimed at getting you from being a couch potato to running a little over 3 miles. So, maybe he got me at a moment of weakness. Or maybe it was looking at him, just having gone through years of being pretty disabled, not being able to even take his dogs for a walk around the block because of his bad heart, just having survived this major surgery. I thought to myself “what’s my excuse?” Whatever it was, and no matter how ludicrous it seemed at the time, when he asked me if I wanted to join him, I said “Yes.”

Last week used poetry to look at how words create worlds and how words can bring our wildest imaginings to life. Words are powerful things and we saw the stark reality of that last Wednesday, when the words of the President – his accumulated words over the course of the past five years – led to a violent insurrection and the occupation of the Capitol by treasonous terrorists. But today, I want to focus on the power of one word. One simple word. The word “yes.” As Kwame Alexander told us in his Ted Talk, “When we say ‘yes,’ we are allowing our minds to create a reality for ourselves, rather than letting others create it for us.” Or, to put it another way, “Yes” is the door, the portal, the threshold that takes us from our current reality into some unrealized, and maybe even unimagined, future.

When I think of the power of this one little word, “Yes,” it makes me think back to the early 1960’s, and President Kennedy’s speech, in which he set the goal of putting a human being on the moon within the decade. It was an unimaginable feat at the time – even laughable. When JFK cast that vision, the U.S. space program was barely – literally barely – off the ground. But that current reality was shifted by a nation – our cabinet secretaries, our senators and representatives, the entire governmental hierarchy, along with the scientists and engineers and the brave pilots of the emerging space program – all saying “yes.”

How many times have we been told “No” in our lives? No, you’re not smart enough to get into college. No, you’re not qualified for that job. No, you’re

Before I begin my remarks on this Martin Luther King Sunday, I want to acknowledge that, for some, Dr. King has become something of an anachronism. A vestige of the past who has little relevance or value to the struggle for Black Lives in the 21st century. There is a sentiment among many of the new generation of powerful and prophetic advocates within the current movement for justice that today’s struggle is very different from the struggles Dr. King and his generation faced, and that, while we must express our appreciation for him and those who walked beside him, we should not venerate him. They fear that celebrating Dr. King’s legacy, as exemplified by the placement of his memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., distracts us from the very real dangers to black lives today – at the hands of the police, in the face of Covid-19, in the school to prison pipeline, in the inequitable impact of environmental devastation of communities of color. I want to acknowledge those voices, because it’s important for us – especially the white people among us – to hear and to heed them. My hope today is that I might perhaps find a way to bridge that generational divide, to examine a piece of Dr King’s legacy not for the sake of some nostalgic celebration, but as a way of grounding us in the work that is before all of us today.

As we heard in Dr. King’s Nobel acceptance speech, delivered on December 10, 1964:

“I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the “isness” of man’s present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal “oughtness” that forever confronts him. I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsom and jetsom in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.”

These words, spoken toward the end of the year 1964, were delivered less than a decade after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus and after the Montgomery Bus Boycott that followed. They were delivered just four years after Ruby Bridges was escorted into school by Federal marshals and a year after King’s delivery of his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom – which was the same year that four little girls were murdered by a bomb that devastated the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Dr. King addressed the Nobel Committee just six months after President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I reiterate these events and put Dr. King’s words into this context because, when he spoke them before a mostly white audience in Oslo, Norway, there was very little evidence pointing toward the realization of his dream, and barely any basis in reality for his refusal “to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.”

In his speech to the Nobel Committee, as well as in his “I have a dream” speech, Dr. King proclaimed a view of the future that did not, never has, and maybe never will exist. That vision was grounded in a deep theological understanding of the “not-yet-ness” of the Kingdom of God and a deep-seated belief in its eventual realization. From this theological foundation, Dr. King cast a vision of a world of justice, equity, economic opportunity and peace. From it he created so many of the memorable phrases that we quote today, like being judged not by the color of our skin but the content of our character.  It is the power of King’s imagination -his moral imagination – that seized and inspired millions to work to bring his dream to reality.

Philosophers define “Moral imagination” as “an ability to imaginatively discern

About ten years ago I took up the sport of paragliding. In paragliding you strap yourself into a harness that’s attached to a large fabric wing that enables you to glide and soar through the air like a bird. It’s the closest thing to what I call “pure flying.” There’s no bulky, noisy engine to propel you. It’s just you and the wind. When I started paragliding we worked on a flat field and learned how to handle the wing in the breeze, how to get it stable over our heads. Once we were reasonably good at that, we worked our way up a small hill and ran down it. I’ll never forget the feeling of my feet first leaving the ground. As I got better and better, I moved up the practice hill for longer, higher glides back to earth. Within a few weeks the big day came. Terry, my instructor said I was ready, so with a couple other students we piled into the back of a pickup truck and drove to the top of Blue Mountain, a ski resort in the Poconos. Terry set us up at the top of an expert run that dropped off precipitously. As we waited for the wind to blow just right, I looked down the slope and out into the valley below. My heart was in my throat and, I’ll admit it: I was scared. Terry gave us one last reminder before pushing his baby birds out of the nest: “Remember, you’ve got to go for it. You’ve got to commit. When I give the signal, you’ve got to run like hell. Whatever you do, don’t stop.” I watched as one, then another of my fellow students took to the air, and then it was my turn. I got the wing up in the air above me as I’d been trained. I turned to face the wind, and when Terry gave the signal I ran as fast as I could toward the edge of a steep drop-off, hoping and praying that I’d get airborne before I went over it.

“You’ve got to commit. Whatever you do, don’t stop.” My instructor’s words have stuck with me to this day, even though I packed up my paraglider for the last time a few years ago and have been earthbound ever since. How many times in our lives do we find ourselves standing at the top of a mountain, where we have to decide whether to stay safely where we are or to take a chance and try to soar? To commit ourselves to something scary or unknown? Where we face these critical choices, these moments of truth?  And how many times do we later wonder what might have been?  What might have been had we taken the bold step?  What might have been had we not been afraid?  Had we had enough courage?  Had we ignored the naysayers and trusted our gut?  Had we gone “all in” instead of holding back?

The only way to avoid the wondering of the “what if” is to make a full, unrestrained commitment to a course of action, whatever challenge it is that we’re facing.  It’s like standing on the edge of a swimming pool when we know the water’s cold.  Dipping our toes isn’t going to get us into the water; we’ve got to jump in with both feet, or even head first.  The lesson I learned from paragliding is that, to gain the glorious freedom of the flight you’ve got to overcome the fear of failure.  It’s about going “all in” every time. 

As you know, our Soul Matters theme for this month is “commitment,” and we here at UUCDC are in the middle of our Annual Fund Drive, so I’ve been thinking about what our faith demands of us. What kind of commitments we’re asked to make as members of our congregations, as members of this faith?    While belonging to a congregation and living our lives as Unitarian Universalists isn’t likely to be as physically risky as paragliding, I’d like to believe that the same lesson applies.  If we’re going to fly, we’ve got to commit.  We’ve got to go “all in.” 

When I think of going “all in” for our faith, I think about the sixteenth century Unitarian Michael Servetus.  Talk about committed.  Imagine living in 16th Century Europe, where the Church of Rome is burning heretics at the stake all over the Continent.  W

I’m guessing that there might be a few folks here today who are as geeky about space flight as I am. But only a few. Having grown up in the ‘60’s, as the space race unfolded chapter by chapter, from the John Glenn and the Mercury 7 to Gemini missions with the first space walks and docking maneuvers to the Apollo 1 disaster and ultimately to landing on the moon in July of 1969, I was glued to every news report about what was happening in the heavens. My parents actually took us to Cape Kennedy to witness the launch of Apollo 16 in person, from just a few miles away, and my memory of that event – the massive fireball from the Saturn V engines, followed by their deafening roar and the ground literally shaking beneath my feet – still gives me chills to this day, nearly 50 years later.

So, you shouldn’t be surprised that I was glued to the TV as Perseverance began its descent into the Martian atmosphere last month. It was a bold and audacious descent, a Rube-Goldberg contraption that sounded like it was dreamt up by a couple of twelve year-olds in their basement after school one day: “Hey, what if we packed the rover inside this capsule with a massive parachute, but instead of the parachute taking it to the surface we had it hooked up to its own rocket engines, and when it gets close to the surface, we release the parachute and the heat shield, and we fire off these four rockets to slow it down.” Then the other kid says, “Yeah, yeah. And it uses artificial intelligence to look for the best landing spot and to keep it on track, because it takes 11 minutes for signals to travel from here to Mars so we can’t control what’s happening in real time.” And the first kid says, “Right. But listen to this. The rockets don’t lower it down to the surface. Let’s have the rover hooked up to this big sky crane kind of thing, so that while the rockets keep it hovering, we lower the rover the rest of the way down to the surface by wires. Then, when the rover has landed, we release the wires and send the rocket part off to crash a few miles away.”

That’s exactly the landing system the NASA scientists and engineers dreamt up and launched into space last July. And on February 18, Irene and I sat glued to the TV as data from the rover was fed into mission control and relayed to the public. Confirmation of parachute deployment. Confirmation of descent rockets firing. Confirmation of the sky crane lowering Perseverance to the surface. Confirmation of the release and the rocket blasting away from the area. And finally, confirmation of Perseverance sitting safely on the surface of a planet more than 140 million miles away from Earth. Irene cheered and cried. I cheered and cried. Scientists around the globe cheered and cried. It was an amazing feat of engineering. Both the end and the beginning of an amazing journey that started out as someone’s dream, someone’s idea, and that was more than 8 years in the making. A startling accomplishment and a stunning example of the power of science and ingenuity and teamwork. [You can watch a video of the actual descent and landing here: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/320185-nasa-releases-incredible-perseverance-rover-landing-video

Now, let me bring this all back down to Earth, and more specifically down to our own little piece of ground, the community we affectionately call “UUCDC.” Because today is Stewardship Sunday, the day that we officially kick off our pledge campaign for the coming year. I’m deeply grateful for Lori and Natasha’s leadership of the campaign, and for all those who are working to make it happen. And I’m deeply grateful to all of you who will make your pledges and make the campaign to support our congregation a success.

Like the Mars rover, this community began as a dream, an idea. An audacious one, in fact. A small group of thoughtful and faithful people had the bold and courageous idea of creating a progressive religious community here in the then-solidly conservative suburb of Ph