Rev. Babcock's sermons in 2000

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DATE	SERMON TITLE	Notes from The Steeple Weekly
12/24/2000	Christmas Memories
12/10/2000	Holy Silence	For me, the holiday season is a time look inward and to go deeper toward the silent center of things. The sermon this morning will look at the idea of "holy silence" which, I believe, lies at the heart of all worship. I also want to address the issue of applause during the worship service.
12/3/2000	Mystery	We are entering the holiday season, and the temptation for some of us is to reduce the Christmas story to some rationally explicable lowest common denominator. But the great Catholic journalist G. K. Chesterton once wrote, "As long as you have mystery, you have health." What did he mean? Unitarian Universalists have been very skeptical about the mysterious, sometimes with good reason. But not always. This morning's sermon will investigate "mystery" and its role in a healthy and balanced religious outlook. --Harold Babcock
11/19/2000	The Word of Thankfulness
11/12/2000	The Shared Ministry	During the announcement period in church each Sunday, I usually invite people into "the shared ministry of our church community." What does this really mean? Can lay people be ministers, too? Our tradition says yes. The sermon will look at the relationship between the ordained, "professional" minister and what Luther called "the priesthood of all believers."
11/5/2000	What Is Expected of Us?	Sunday, November 5: Intergenerational Sunday. Sermon: "What Is Expected of Us?" The prophet Micah asks, "And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" The brief sermon will investigate the demands of the religious life. --Harold Babcock
10/22/2000	Faith is the Gift of God	These words, taken from the Edict of Torda (1568), are one of the first statements of religious toleration, the idea that in matters of religion the "conscience cannot be forced." Our Transylvanian Unitarian ancestor, Francis David, was in large part responsible for the creation of this act of toleration. In light of the current situation in the Middle East, the sermon will investigate the need for toleration in a world of competing truths.
10/15/2000	Companionship	I will reflect on the meaning of companionship, with help from Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, and others.
10/8/2000	Salvaging the Leaning	The title is taken from Alice Walker's poem, "Sunday School, Circa 1950." I want to investigate what it is that is most important in our religious education programming and in life.
9/24/2000	The Persistence of Hate	My sermon for September 24 will be in recognition of the impending Jewish High Holy Days. I will grapple with the question of why hate persists, though I promise no satisfying answers.
9/17/2000	Sightless Among Miracles	The title is taken from a Jewish Sabbath prayer: "Day pass, years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles." The sermon is about recognizing the sacred in the ordinary, or what Boston Globe science writer Chet Raymo in a recent column calls "taking adequate steps" through the world. Inevitably, it is about memory and the passage of time.
9/10/2000	Simple Gifts
7/30/2000	The Weight of History	The sermon will consist of some brief initial reflections on my trip to Eastern Europe and my visit to Transylvania, and some comparisons with the history we celebrate here in Newburyport during Yankee Homecoming. It seems to me we Americans are lucky that we do not have to carry the weight of history that the countries I visited do.
7/16/2000	Sermon Preached at Ujszekely, Transylvania
6/18/2000	Love's Austere and Lonely Offices	The title is a quotation from Robert Hayden's poem "Those Winter Sundays." The sermon will reflect on the nature of fatherhood and the relationship of fathers and sons, among other things.
6/4/2000	Negative Miracles	A friend introduced this concept to me many years ago. The idea here is that the worst things that happen to us sometimes turn out to be the best things for us. This is not so much a defense of suffering (suffering as redemptive) as it is a celebration of our human ability to meet suffering, failure, error, and loss and to make meaning of them. I'm a believer in miracles of the everyday kind, even negative ones.
5/28/2000	Precious Memories	My sermon this Sunday, as on previous Memorial Day Sundays, will look at the idea of memory, in this case the intersection of personal, family history and national history. One of the great discoveries of my young adulthood was that I had ancestors at two of the greatest battles of the American Civil War: Bull Run and Gettysburg. Both of them, brothers, died, one of them after a dreadful amptutation. I have thought long and hard about this connection to "great events." What did it mean for them, and, perhaps more importantly, what does it mean for me? The sermon will investigate our "precious memories."
5/14/2000	Focus	A colleague recently called my attention to the death of DeCoursey Fales, Jr. The Boston Globe obituary summarized Dr. Fales as a 'Scholar who focused on a single vase.' An archeologist and historian, Dr. Fales spent much of his life studying a single Greek vase. Granted, it must have been an important vase, but still one is struck by his ability to focus on it. As my colleague wrote, 'For a lifetime, he did one thing well.' The sermon will examine the wisdom of 'focus.'
5/7/2000	The Ideal of Inclusiveness	Unitarian Universalism has always tried to be inclusive. Perhaps the closest we ever came to a heresy "trial" was in the case of Theodore Parker, in 1843. The sermon will recount this episode as a way of considering the ideal of inclusiveness. This morning we will once again welcome new members (those who have decided to become voting members of the congregation and who have signed an application for membership) into the fellowship of our church community in a Ceremony of Recognition. I look forward to seeing you in church.
4/23/00	The Larger Hope	The early Universalists believed that all people would ultimately be "saved" - that is, returned to a state of wholeness and health, and to a relationship of at-oneness with God. They called this belief "the larger hope. Whether or not one believes in an afterlife (even St. Paul was unsure what form it might take), Unitarian Universalism affirms the reality of rebirth, resurrection, and renewal in this life. The brief sermon will investigate "the larger hope." This morning's Easter Intergenerational Service will include special music and singing by the Young Church Choir. There will be a special moment for the children. This service is an opportunity for adults and children to worship together as one church family. As always, there will be nursery care for the 3-and-under set. I hope you will join us for this special celebration!
4/16/00	Costly Grace: The Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer	Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor of the German Confessing Church (which dissented with Nazism) in the years prior to and during World War II. Arrested and imprisoned for his role in the failed July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, he was executed by the Nazis in the closing days of the war. The sermon will offer a brief biographical sketch of Bonhoeffer, then look at a few of the ideas which developed out of his resistance to Hitler and his imprisonment under the Nazis. In particular, I want to examine his ideas of community and his notion of "cheap" versus "costly" grace.
4/2/00	Creating an Inner Religious Life	We all desperately need what my colleague Bruce Southworth calls "disciplines of the spirit that help [us] fall more deeply in love with life and its giftedness." To make all of life "religious" - to give meaning to all that we do - that is the task that we need to be about, and it will take some intentionality on our own parts to get there. The sermon will investigate.
3/26/00	From Committee to Community	People come to a church in our time with a search for community, not committee, writes Kennon Callahan in his book Effective Church Leadership. Committees may be necessary, but they are not enough. What we seek is a deepening of our relationships, a sense not only of membership but of ministry. Ultimately, I believe we contribute to the church because we care about the community we find there. The sermon will investigate.
2/27/00	Christ and Politics	To confess Jesus at the present moment argues no moral courage. It may even betray a servility and worldliness of mind. These words, spoken by Unitarian William Ellery Channing in the early 19th century, may be truer now than they were then. When candidate George W. Bush claimed Christ as the "political philosopher" he most admires, Boston Globe columnist James Carroll correctly asked, "Which Christ is Bush's model?" The sermon will investigate the question of "Christ and Politics."
2/20/00	Lincoln Remembered	When any church will ascribe over its altar, or its sole qualification for membership, the condensed statement of the substance of both Law and Gospel. `Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy might, and thy neighbor as thyself,' that church will I join with all my heart and with all my soul, wrote Abraham Lincoln. In honor of President's Day, this morning's sermon will remember Lincoln's wit and wisdom. Interspersed will be a reading of Walt Whitman's description of Lincoln's assassination.
2/13/00	Like Seeing the Face of God	This morning's sermon topic was suggested to me by our long time member Frank Morrill. Frank asked if I could speak about Jesus' response to the question, "And who is my neighbor?" If you remember, Jesus told a story about a Samaritan. The sermon will investigate the commandment to "love thy neighbor."
1/30/00	To Build or Not to Build	As I hope most of you know by now, the First Religious Society has for several years been exploring the possibility of expanding our existing space. Conceptual plans for a building expansion program have been drawn (and have been on display in the church), and an architect has been contracted to produce more detailed schematic drawings for the proposed project. On Feb. 6 after church there will be a congregational meeting to decide whether to proceed with a Feasibility Study to determine if we are ready to undertake a Capital Fundraising Campaign and to make our dreams reality. My sermon will explore the question, "to build or not to build?"
1/23/00	Our Radical Affirmation of Human Nature	Unitarians and Universalists historically were famous (or infamous, as the case may be) for their radical affirmation of human nature. Both groups early did away with a doctrine of Original Sin. Neither group felt that eternal hell and damnation was warranted for the errors perpetrated by human beings. Both were extremely optimistic about human nature, its present reality and future prospects. UUs remain optimistic, as clauses in our Purposes and Principles are evidence. However, in recent years some - most notably UU theologian and ethicist James Luther Adams - have called our optimism into question. The sermon will take a critical look at one of our most cherished liberal religious affirmations.
1/9/00	The Continuing Struggle for Human Rights	The struggle for human rights is ongoing. Though much has been accomplished, much remains to be done. I am thankful for my Unitarian Universalist upbringing which first opened my eyes to this struggle. As the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, "We must all learn to live together as brothers [and sisters] or we will all perish as fools."
1/2/00	Love and Death	In a recent program on poetry which I presented to the Women's Alliance, I came across the following quotation about poetry, by contemporary writer James Dickey: "The greatest themes of poetry are the inevitability of death and the possibility of love." It has been lurking around in my head ever since. In the greatest poetry, both themes are present. The sermon will investigate the truth of Dickey's statement.