RevCyn

The merger of the Unitarian and the Universalist denominations took place 50 years ago -- the official date was May 15, 1961.  So, of course, I started thinking about my experiences at the merger.  But, wait!  I wasn't born yet! That's right, one of the neat things that we can celebrate is that there are generations now of people who are Unitarian Universalists from childhood on, some even with ten years or more in the ministry, who were raised in, influenced by, and in turn influenced themselves this new association that was created 50 years ago. Many argued then that without this merger, Universalism would die.  I look around me here, and I really believe that.  At the time of merger, there were three little rural Universalist churches between ten and fifteen miles from Jackson.  My church, a small rural Universalist church, joined the new UUA, and it's still going strong.  The Universalist church in Horton, MI did not join the UUA, but even...

As many of my readers know, I'm on sabbatical.  But I had volunteered to preach this past weekend at a colleague's church on her Sunday off.  I had volunteered a new sermon topic, rather than a "canned" one, but one I knew I would use again in my own congregation later.  I was most of the way done with my sermon, a sermon on the future of Unitarian Universalism, and had two parts left to go -- one was on the work our denomination has done on immigration reform, particularly in Arizona, and then the conclusion. That's where I had left things on Friday night.  When I got back on the computer late Saturday afternoon, I checked into Facebook, and was hit by the news of the tragic shootings in Tucson, Arizona.  I knew I couldn't complete my sermon as I had planned, and was going to have to change it.  Because I wasn't preaching in my own church, I didn't completely scrap the sermon, but as you'll see below it was greatly changed. My first instinct wa...