with David Rohe

Worship Associate:- Kurt Payne

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©2019 David Rohe

Opening Words

As usual, I did a little research for this talk today, very little, and started with investigating what sounds a swan makes so I could comment on them here. Guess what. Swans are mute. Irony is great.

Undeterred, I pressed on since I believe I have something worthwhile to say to this community, and besides, I like y’all. My tendency, wherever I land is to try to make something a bit better. Due to my previous experiences at UU churches I think I see a way to offer ideas for this church to get where it seems to want to go. So, muteness aside, this talk is about what I want to leave you with as Sharon and I head out on a new adventure, or adventures, beginning this winter.

Is it OK to pick and choose religious beliefs and practices?

with Viv Allen.

Also, here is today’s ‘Time for all ages’.

© 2019 Vivienne Allen

I start with a Unitarian joke – apologies if you’ve heard it before.

At a great international interfaith gathering at a major convention hotel, five delegates found themselves waiting and waiting for the elevator following one of the sessions. To break the monotony and silence, one of delegates suggested they play a little game: “Let’s see if we can explain our faith in the time it takes the elevator to go from here to the first floor!” Although they would have to travel up and down several times, the delegates agreed.

with Sharon Robinson

Worship Leader:- Dave Rohe

with David Hines

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Intro

There are three things I didn’t realise about global warming, and they were all presented at the Sea of Faith  Conference in Upper Hutt in October. The speaker was an engineer,  Geoff Henderson, and I think that’s what gave it such a different angle.

He said there was a lot of optimism round the world in early 90s that the need to phase out fossil fuels would be picked up globally. That came to a head in the Kyoto protocol in 1997 – an international agreement to cut down on the emission of gases that lead to global warming. But unfortunately, he said, there has been little progress since then.

And he said there were three reasons for this, of which the first was most striking to me… I had wondered why global warming could be such a problem, when it was all about things like the world getting half a degree warmer.

with Rev. Clay Nelson

Watch

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Opening Words are excerpts from The Evolution of Simplicity” by David Brooks in the New York Times 3/11/15.

The meditation is “Hopping over the surface of life by Doug Kraft.

Closing Words / Karakia Whakamutunga are “Go Forth in Simplicity” by Samuel A Trumbore.

Clay Nelson © 2^nd December 2018

Sometimes when I publish the title of a future sermon, I wish I’d spend more time thinking it through first and not when I’m trying to write it. This is definitely one of those occasions. The more I thought about simplicity, the more I realised living simply isn’t simple. It may not be possible or always that desirable.

I went blindly down this path because of my attachment to the song we just sang, Tis a gift to be simple. It was one of my mother’s favourites and I chose it for her funeral service. She thought of herself as simple, but that should have been a red flag. In truth, she was a very complex person. Like her, simplicity may be a gift but if viewed at face value we will not fully appreciate it until we unwrap it.