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Archives: Services
The One Moment That Changes Everything
Inspired by a dear friend who is fighting for his life in a hospital in central Florida, this sermon will not be a sappy and mild admonishment to be grateful for each day. No way. It will be a full on revelation of that one pivotal moment we either accept the invitation to, or wonder why we are so miserable. Come prepared to leave changed.
When Hope Is Hard to Find
We hear many despairing voices around us today. So many problems look huge and unyielding: climate change, global economic disruption, economic and racial inequality, violence both far away and close by. People are doubting their ability to make positive change happen. How do we doubt this doubt? Where do we find hope when hope is hard to find?
About Rules
If the 10 commandments aren’t a passionate guide for our lives and those of other faiths seem obscure or less applicable, what source might suggest a contemporary and rigorous basis for personal decision-making?
Stories From A Life in Music
July 3: In my nearly 70 years as a dedicated music student, performer and teacher, I find that I have experienced many life lessons, serious, ridiculous, profoundly mysterious, funny, exasperating. Some of my stories might be parables. Others are just unexpected. A life in the arts can be interesting to examine because it has essentially different goals than most vocations. Gary … Continue reading Stories From A Life in Music
Trapeze: The Art of Letting Go
What is faith and why is it important? Where most people tend to equate faith and belief, they are in fact two very different things. Beliefs are but ideas that have chosen to accept as truth, often in spite of evidence to the contrary. Faith, on the other hand, is the willingness to let go of even our most cherished beliefs in pursuit of truth and meaning.
Dylan’s Truth
Ours is an age in which opinions rule while “truth” is at best an elusive commodity: a suspect ideal to postmodern liberals, or (to the other side) the strict word of a stricter God. But only by appealing to truth can we call out what is nonsense. So, bypassing philosophers, I find in Bob Dylan’s 45-year body of art an elemental truth. Dylan’s is a truth steeped in tradition yet devoted to creativity, defiantly challenging everything “phony,” to the very UU refrain: “for every hung up person in the whole wide universe.”
Impressionism and Grace: Aging and Dying as a Work of Art
The 19th century art movement known as Impressionism was a radical departure from traditional art forms and from the realism offered by the then emerging technology of photography. Impressionism changed the very nature of the way we think about art. It also offers intriguing possibilities to change the way we think about life, aging, and death.
Riding the Waves of Change
Transitions never cease in the life of a congregation. Ministers come and go; finances rise and fall; neighborhoods thrive and fail. This morning we explore how to manage the excitement, anxieties and frustrations of shifting times, drawing from the teachings of the Tao te Ching.
Billy Thomas – “The Ten Virtuous Actions”
May 29th About our Speaker: Billy has a BA degree from Stetson University, an MA from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and post graduate hours in counseling from the University of North Florida. He is an Academic Counselor at Florida State College at Jacksonville and the Director of the Karma Kagyu Study Group. Worship Leader: … Continue reading Billy Thomas – “The Ten Virtuous Actions”