This sermon came about because one of the mothers of young children in our church asked for it.  At her suggestion, I arranged for a series of three lunches with a total of twelve mothers of young children, read one book I was assigned, and a long chapter in another book.

. . .

  Both the live mothers and the mothers reported on in the two books were mostly women born in the 60s and 70s.  Some of them said one of the great things about growing up in an age of women’s rights with men who were sympathetic to the goals of feminism was that when they married, they felt that they married their best friends.  It was an egalitarian marriage, where they were able to negotiate in a wider range of areas, both personal and professional, than their mothers or grandmothers had.

     They developed a sense of Self, both in school and in their careers, that had been out of reach for most women before them. 

Then the baby comes, and everything changes

The full text of this sermon can be found online at http://www.austinuu.org/sermons/ and was originally delivered on May 7, 2006.

I want to empower each and every one of you here today. I want you to take back the power of prayer. I want you to realize that you are praying and part of you is listening and the part of you that is listening may, in fact, be in a very concrete manner answering all your prayers.

The full text of this sermon can be found online at http://www.austinuu.org/sermons/ and was originally delivered on April 30th, 2006.

I thought that in the next thirty minutes, we might cover the nature of all human knowledge, religious and scientific certainty and denial, discrimination and bigotry, the degradation of the environment, and the nature of the kingdom of God.  I’ve tried to cut this down from its original length of nine years.

The full text of this sermon can be found online at http://www.austinuu.org/sermons/ and was originally published on April 23rd, 2006.

    My name is Davidson and I’m a recovering television addict.  That may sound silly, but it’s true.  When I bought my house two years ago, I decided not to have cable connected.  So for the past two years, I have not watched any television at home. 

     I made the decision to go cold turkey when I realized that I’d been watching an average of over four hours of television a night for several years, and couldn’t remember ever seeing anything I really needed to know, and very little that I could even remember. 

     Now I read more books, and go out to my shop and turn wooden bowls, and sometimes have dinner with friends - things I didn’t have time to do when my television addiction was in full swing.

The full text of this sermon can be found online at http://www.austinuu.org/sermons/, and was originally delivered on October 9th, 2005.

Thanksgiving is a holiday like Christmas or the 4^th of July, in that the original story always needs to be retold as the background for each year’s remembrances and reflections. Also like Christmas or the 4^th of July, Thanksgiving is about a spirit, an attitude that we want to stay with us on all days, not just the holidays. 

     As the 4^th of July celebrates the spirit of Independence, and reminds us of the struggles necessary to earn that independence, and as Christmas reminds us that the birth of the sacred can occur any time, any place, and in the humblest of surroundings, so Thanksgiving reminds us of the attitude, the vision, needed to let life’s sorrows be trumped by life’s joys and blessings. 

The text of the sermon can be found online at http://www.austinuu.org/sermons/ and was originally delivered on November 20th, 2005.