Real People: Membership Service

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Sermon #60 (29th May 2022 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

I promised you a short service today, on this day when we celebrate membership, commitment, and belonging, and hold our AGM. So I’m going to do my best to distil this morning’s message:

The church is us. Yes, us. (point around room, to camera, to self). We are it. We are all there is.

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Hand-Made

Colorful skeins of wool with knitting needles and sweater on wooden background

Sermon #59 (15th May 2022 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

I wonder, what do you think of when you hear the phrase ‘hand-made’? Maybe scarves, hats, socks, jumpers or blankets, knitted by family members or friends and given as gifts? Clothing or jewellery. Pottery or sculpture. Woodwork or furnishings. Cards. Cakes, even.

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Easter: Walking Wounded

Jesus Christ Carrying Cross up Calvary on Good Friday

Sermon #58 (17th April 2022 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

Last Monday – no, Tuesday – it was sometime past midnight, I was sat with my dad – my 85-year-old dad – in a pretty crowded A&E waiting room at the Royal London Hospital over in Whitechapel. We’d been there since teatime, nine hours, advised by 111 to go and get him urgently checked out for a symptom that was potentially ominous (he’s fine now, by the way, turns out it was nothing too serious in the end, but that’s not the point of me telling you about this). I just want you to imagine the scene. In the A&E waiting room, in the early hours, surrounded by human suffering and grim-faced endurance, people in all manner of states of pain, misery, and disrepair, each with their own personal ‘cross to bear’. Nobody wants to be in A&E at 3am on a Tuesday morning – neither patients nor staff – unless you are driven there by urgent need or dire suffering and you’ve got nowhere else to turn.

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How to be a Unitarian…

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Sermon #57 (3rd April 2022 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

So, as I mentioned earlier, between January and March of this year we had held a six-part course on ‘How to be a Unitarian’. We had far more people sign-up than I’d ever anticipated, loads from this congregation, but because it was online we had people joining us from up and down the land, including ministers from other congregations, and the chief officer of the General Assembly, our national Unitarian organisation, Liz Slade. So it turned into a big deal!

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The Good Samaritan

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Sermon #56 (20th March 2022 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

The Good Samaritan, as I mentioned at the start of the service today, is one of those parables that has transcended its origins. If you speak of a ‘Good Samaritan’ most people will probably have at least an approximate sense of what you might mean by that phrase – perhaps someone who unselfishly acts to help another person who is in distress – who shows an unusual degree of compassion and generosity – maybe in a situation where it is a bit surprising for them to do so.

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People Want Peace

Dorothy Day II

Sermon #55 (6th March 2022 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

‘People want peace,’ as Dorothy Day said. So far, so uncontroversial. Surely most of us do indeed long for peace, though in ‘ordinary times’ perhaps most of us don’t spend that much of our time actively thinking about it. But it seems we are living through pretty extraordinary times right now. The unfolding events in Ukraine, and their global ramifications, are front-and-centre in the news and in the minds and hearts of many of us. I was at the church, in Kensington, on Friday and saw that people protesting the invasion had tied hundreds of sunflowers to the barriers outside the Russian embassy (so I was moved to bring sunflowers to our service today as a sign of solidarity).

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Be My Guest

Welcome cleaning foot carpet with shoes and

Sermon #54 (21st November 2021 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

Once upon a time – it seems to me – there was a ‘one size fits all’ approach to hospitality. You could, at least in principle, consult an etiquette guide which would spell out in fine detail the proper way to conduct yourself as a host or as a guest (in a particular cultural context). And most of us will likely have been brought up with at least an approximate sense of what counts as ‘good manners’ relative to the expectations of the class and culture we grew up in.

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Crying for Help

Help message in a bottle on beach

Sermon #53 (19th September 2021 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

Earlier in the year, following the retirement of our minister, we decided to start a new venture – a Pastoral Network – in hope of being a bit more intentional about sharing out the responsibility for pastoral care in the congregation, during this time of transition, and hopefully for the long-term too. This isn’t something we’ve done before, and though we did our homework, and sought advice, being eager to learn about how this sort of thing works in other churches, it also got us reflecting on our own prior experiences of giving and receiving support – that is, the seven of us who are currently involved in running the Pastoral Network: me, Jeannene, Chloë, Sonya, Pat, Marianne, and Michaela – over the summer we got into an important conversation together about the relationship between ‘the helper’ and ‘the helped’ and how, in the end, we are all a bit of both. Some days we’re more aware of our struggles and needs, and we’re the one crying for help, other days we’re more aware of our strengths and gifts, and we’re in a position to respond to others’ cries. Perhaps most days we might find ourselves a mixture, somewhere in the middle.

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Off the Hook

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Sermon #52 (5th September 2021 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

I wonder how many of you were glued to the Toyko Olympics on TV this summer. Maybe not quite so many of us were watching as in years gone by, what with the inconvenient time difference to Japan, and the rights being sold off so that only a fraction of the action made it to free-to-air channels. But even if you aren’t an avid sports fan I imagine that most of you will have heard at least something of the story of Simone Biles, US gymnast, and all-round legend in her own lifetime. In large part, she inspired this morning’s theme.

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It’s Complicated

doctor untangling a brain knot

Sermon #51 (6th June 2021 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

Anyone who’s on our church mailing list – and presumably that includes everyone who’s with us live on zoom this morning, seeing as that’s how you get the link to join us – will hopefully by now have seen an email that we sent out on Thursday about our plans for the coming months. Roy and I sent out this message, on behalf of the church management committee, to explain how we’d carefully weighed up a lot of different factors in coming to the conclusion – that we’d keep our Sunday services online over the next few months – and take our time to prepare properly for hybrid services later in the year (subject to developments in the Covid situation).

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