Sermons & Invocations
Each month we will be posting recording from Sunday worship. These are intended to offer clarity on our monthly themes as we move through the month deepening our expression and experience.
Church Year 2019-20
Church Year 2018-19
Church Year 2017-18
Art Gallery!!!
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We love our Art Gallery! Of course, you must to come in person to see all the different pieces showing by members of our congregation, but here's a glimpse of it with Rev. Matthew's opening day remarks, "Art is Blessing."
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UUJAZ Day at the Legislature
February 20, 2017
Invocation opening the State Senate Session offered by the Rev. Matthew Funke Crary
Spirit of Life, given many names in many tongues, but known too through the silent example moving through this beautiful and harsh land and within the lives of diverse and rugged inhabitants, we come here today, divided.
We gather in this hall of leadership this place that holds such power, justice, economic, and political power, over Arizona, the land and its inhabitants…
In a moment and with hands upon our hearts
and make a pledge to our red, white and blue flag, fifty stars and thirteen stripes, offering allegiance to the single, united fabric of our country, a republic indivisible…
And despite our desperate need for our pledge to be true, for there to be liberty and justice for all in our country, our state -for the land and it inhabitants - we know that we are divided.
The division in our justice system is as wide as the Grand Canyon. The disparity in our economics is as oppressive as the summer heart. And in our politics... we are as prickly as any Sonoran cactus.
In this division we have fallen to our lowest common denominators; upholding punishment over restoration, prizing competition over cooperation, and walling ourselves off into “THEM” verses “US.”
Spirit of life, forgive us for forgetting who we are.
We have not lived up to our highest shared measure.
We have forgotten the example of the summer monsoon, which has the power to destroy but also restores the dry cracked earth. That the deadliest desert teems with life only through balance and cooperation. And that it is the bridges we build, not the walls, that are the strength of our people.
Spirit of Life, teach us as you did our most sage ancestors to learn again that what truly unites and empowers us is mercy, compassion and wisdom. And may we pledge ourselves today in this place of power to the greater power of just mercy, economic compassion, and to political wisdom that we might learn to live undivided.
Living by the example of the Spirit may be a people of gratitude for the many blessings of this land and its inhabitants, celebrating, singing, dancing together in this the only life we share.
May it be so,
Blessed be
Amen
Spirit of Life, given many names in many tongues, but known too through the silent example moving through this beautiful and harsh land and within the lives of diverse and rugged inhabitants, we come here today, divided.
We gather in this hall of leadership this place that holds such power, justice, economic, and political power, over Arizona, the land and its inhabitants…
In a moment and with hands upon our hearts
and make a pledge to our red, white and blue flag, fifty stars and thirteen stripes, offering allegiance to the single, united fabric of our country, a republic indivisible…
And despite our desperate need for our pledge to be true, for there to be liberty and justice for all in our country, our state -for the land and it inhabitants - we know that we are divided.
The division in our justice system is as wide as the Grand Canyon. The disparity in our economics is as oppressive as the summer heart. And in our politics... we are as prickly as any Sonoran cactus.
In this division we have fallen to our lowest common denominators; upholding punishment over restoration, prizing competition over cooperation, and walling ourselves off into “THEM” verses “US.”
Spirit of life, forgive us for forgetting who we are.
We have not lived up to our highest shared measure.
We have forgotten the example of the summer monsoon, which has the power to destroy but also restores the dry cracked earth. That the deadliest desert teems with life only through balance and cooperation. And that it is the bridges we build, not the walls, that are the strength of our people.
Spirit of Life, teach us as you did our most sage ancestors to learn again that what truly unites and empowers us is mercy, compassion and wisdom. And may we pledge ourselves today in this place of power to the greater power of just mercy, economic compassion, and to political wisdom that we might learn to live undivided.
Living by the example of the Spirit may be a people of gratitude for the many blessings of this land and its inhabitants, celebrating, singing, dancing together in this the only life we share.
May it be so,
Blessed be
Amen